Politics & Power Quote by Zalmay Khalilzad

“Stand on its own feet” is the kind of uplifting phrase that sounds like sovereignty while quietly describing supervision. Khalilzad, speaking as a diplomat-engineer of post-2003 Iraq, wraps a hard geopolitical project in the soft packaging of national therapy: bring “all Iraqis together,” build a “happy future,” create a self-reliant state. The triad is deliberate. Unity, prosperity, independence. Who could argue?

That’s the point. In a fractured country, “national unity government” isn’t a neutral administrative goal; it’s a bid to manufacture legitimacy quickly enough to stabilize a landscape shaped by invasion, sectarian politics, insurgency, and competing regional interests. The quote’s intent is to make coalition-backed state-building feel like an Iraqi-led inevitability rather than a contested experiment. “Program” signals technocratic confidence: messy history can be managed like a development plan. “Happy future” is almost conspicuously vague, a feel-good placeholder where specifics would expose trade-offs: power-sharing bargains, de-Baathification fallout, militia integration, oil revenue distribution.

The subtext is audience management. To Iraqis, it promises dignity and a horizon beyond violence. To Americans and international partners, it frames continued involvement as temporary scaffolding, not occupation. The promise that Iraq will “stand on its own feet” functions as an exit narrative - a way to argue that external actors are midwives, not authors, of the new order.

It works rhetorically because it turns a political struggle into a moral aspiration, and it turns a contested intervention into a story about eventual self-sufficiency - even if the path there depends on precisely the outside leverage the phrase tries to fade into the background.