Leadership Quote by Chris Chocola

Chocola’s line is doing two things at once: selling a war as an emancipation narrative and laundering a partisan argument through the language of journalism. The opening clause is a miniature victory lap. By repeating “did not exist” and “no such thing,” he frames the “Iraqi Free Press” not as an institution with a messy birth but as a clean artifact of intervention, a before-and-after snapshot designed for cable news. The repetition is not accidental; it hammers the idea that freedom is newly delivered, not newly contested.

Then he pivots to the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, a real controversy, but the rhetorical move is larger than the facts on the page. If a newborn press can “break” a story that embarrasses the U.N., the implication is that the old global order was not just flawed but corrupt, and that American power has revealed the rot. “Could potentially turn out to be the largest scandal in history” is classic political inflation: a flexible superlative that signals enormity without taking responsibility for proving it. The phrase invites outrage, not verification.

The subtext is domestic. In the mid-2000s, pro-war politicians needed proof-of-life for the claim that Iraq was becoming democratic, and they also needed a counter-narrative to skepticism about U.S. motives. A “free press” exposing a U.N. scandal does both: it makes the invasion look principled and makes critics look like defenders of a compromised status quo. It’s less a tribute to Iraqi journalism than a piece of message discipline dressed up as praise.