Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Feith

Feith’s sentence is engineered to make coercion sound like cooperation. The “key” isn’t better inspectors, better evidence, or even better diplomacy; it’s Iraq “making the crucial decision” to do what “international pressure” demands. Agency is grammatically assigned to the Iraqi government while politically relocated to the outside world. That syntactic sleight of hand matters: it turns compulsion into consent, a classic move for officials trying to frame force as a neutral instrument of global governance rather than a choice with authors and consequences.

The phrase “making the inspections work” narrows the debate to managerial competence, as if the central problem is process failure. In early-2000s Washington, that framing served a strategic purpose. Weapons inspections were not just fact-finding; they were a public test of legitimacy. If Iraq disarmed “itself,” the story becomes compliance and resolution. If it didn’t, the failure could be pinned on Baghdad’s decision, not on the possibility that the underlying claims were uncertain or that demands were structured to be unmeetable.

“Because of the international pressure” is also doing double duty: it launders U.S. strategic aims through the language of a collective “international” will, implying broad consensus and moral authority. The subtext is a conditional ultimatum posed as a reasonable expectation: sovereignty is acceptable only when it aligns with the requirements of the enforcement regime. Feith’s intent is to pre-script blame and justify escalation while maintaining the rhetorical posture of reluctant, rules-based intervention.