Leadership Quote by Craig L. Thomas

A politician’s compliment can be a policy argument in disguise, and Craig L. Thomas’s line is built to shift credit and responsibility onto Iraqi shoulders at a moment when U.S. involvement needed a cleaner moral ledger. Calling Iraqi recruitment “the largest single contributor” to security isn’t just praise; it’s a reframing device. It recasts stability as something endogenous and self-propelling, implying that the coalition’s role is secondary, supportive, almost administrative. That matters in the Iraq War era, when U.S. leaders were desperate to sell “standing up” Iraqi forces as the prerequisite for Americans to “stand down.”

The phrasing does quiet work. “Continue to step forward” suggests courage under pressure and a steady upward trend, smoothing over the messier realities of insurgency, sectarian fragmentation, and contested loyalty inside security institutions. It also launders the word “effort” into a kind of civic virtue, as if joining the security forces is simply patriotism, not also a paycheck, a factional calculation, or a survival tactic. “Various Iraqi security forces” is deliberately broad: police, army, militias-turned-units, all bundled into a single reassuring category that sounds coherent even when the ground truth was often anything but.

The intent is legislative and rhetorical: to validate continued funding and training while signaling an exit strategy that doesn’t look like retreat. Subtext: Iraqis are taking ownership, so America’s burden is easing and the mission retains legitimacy. It’s optimism with strategic utility.