Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s sentence is built like a policy memo that learned how to speak in thunder. The key move is temporal: 9/11 isn’t framed as an atrocity with an end point, but as a “beginning” - a historical hinge that reclassifies the future as permanent emergency. That’s not just description; it’s authorization. If the struggle has started and has no clear finish line, then extraordinary measures can be sold as ordinary maintenance.

The geography does equal work. “Here on our home territory” taps the deepest American political reflex: the myth of invulnerability punctured. It’s a compact emotional argument for preemption, surveillance, and a more militarized state - because home is now a battlefield. Cheney then widens the aperture to “global operation” and “doesn’t know national boundaries.” On its face, that’s a warning about transnational networks. Underneath, it quietly dissolves the old constraints that borders impose on law, sovereignty, and accountability. If the enemy is borderless, the response is invited to be borderless too.

Even the pronouns matter: “terrorists” are an undifferentiated force; “us” is a unified public-state bloc. That simplification is a feature, not a bug. It discourages nuance (motives, regional politics, blowback) and rewards solidarity behind executive action. Coming from a vice president in the early War on Terror, it reads as a rhetorical foundation for an expansive national security doctrine: less a reflection on 9/11 than a blueprint for what Americans should accept afterward.