Politics & Power Quote by Michael Moore

Moore’s line lands like a blunt instrument, and that’s the point: it refuses the comforting complexity people use to launder a war into something noble. The sentence construction is aggressively flattening. “The motivation for war is simple” isn’t an argument so much as a dare, a move that frames dissent as clarity and official explanations as elaborate stagecraft. Moore’s specific intent is to redirect the audience’s attention from the usual post-9/11 vocabulary of security and liberation to a cruder, older engine: profit.

The subtext is an accusation about who gets to narrate national purpose. By putting “the U.S. government” and “U.S. corporations” in the same breath, Moore collapses the boundary between public interest and private gain. He’s also poking at the way Americans are recruited into empire with the promise of consumer comfort: “which will make Americans rich” isn’t praise, it’s indictment. It suggests complicity, that the spoils aren’t just captured by CEOs but normalized through cheap goods, rising portfolios, and the quiet satisfaction of being on the winning side of globalization.

Context matters. Moore is speaking from the early-2000s anti-Iraq War critique that treated the invasion as a project of access: oil, contracts, geopolitical leverage, and a message to other states about who sets the rules. The line’s power is its moral shortcut. It trades nuance for velocity, betting that outrage moves faster than footnotes - and, in a media environment awash in patriotic scripts, speed is its own kind of counter-programming.