Leadership Quote by Howard Coble

“The closer Iraq approaches freedom and democracy” smuggles in a comforting storyline: history has a direction, the U.S. can point Iraq toward it, and progress is measurable in neat milestones. Howard Coble’s sentence is built to make any backlash legible as proof of success. Violence doesn’t contradict the project; it validates it. That’s the political magic trick here: the worse things look, the more the speaker can argue the strategy is working.

The verb choice matters. Terrorists don’t merely “attack”; they “erect” impediments, like contractors throwing up roadblocks. That framing drains insurgency of politics and replaces it with sabotage. It implies the opposition is irrationally anti-freedom rather than responding to occupation, sectarian power struggles, or the wreckage of state institutions. The subtext is a tidy moral binary: democracy is the natural end state; resistance is pathological.

Contextually, this line fits the post-2003 rhetorical ecosystem in Washington, where Iraq was sold as both a security mission and a democratizing crusade. As casualties rose and stability slipped, officials needed language that could metabolize bad news without conceding error. The quote functions as inoculation: if democratization is met with bloodshed, that’s not a sign of flawed planning, weak legitimacy, or competing national narratives. It’s just the enemy lashing out at the light.

It’s also a subtle demand for patience. By forecasting barriers as inevitable, Coble pre-emptively defends extended timelines, higher costs, and harder measures, all while keeping the moral high ground clean and brightly lit.