Politics & Power Quote by Bill Richardson

Freedom and democracy are doing double duty here: moral language on the surface, geopolitical solvent underneath. Richardson’s sentence is built like a pressure valve for the Iraq moment - it tries to release two dangerous buildups at once: “Islamic fundamentalism” abroad and “hatred for our policies” aimed at the United States. The wager is that uplift can launder fallout.

Notice the careful triangulation. He doesn’t say the Iraq invasion was wrong; he calls attention to “hatred for our policies,” a phrasing that converts accountability into optics. The problem becomes resentment, not the action that produced it. Meanwhile, “sparking a wave” is kinetic and contagious, suggesting democracy as a kind of social physics: say the right words, get the right feelings, watch the region reconfigure. It’s a politician’s favorite fantasy - rhetoric as lever, sentiment as infrastructure.

The subtext is reputational triage. Post-9/11 America needed a frame that could compete with images of occupation and civilian casualties. Democratic “sentiment” offers that frame because it’s hard to argue against in the abstract and easy to export as intention, even when outcomes are messy. Richardson’s language also draws a clean villain/victim map: fundamentalism is something that “has formed” (almost naturally) in the region, while U.S. policy “invading Iraq” is softened by being described as one of many policies people hate, not the central event.

It’s not naïve optimism so much as strategic optimism: the belief that if the story is noble enough, it can outrun the evidence on the ground.