Leadership Quote by Robert Foster Bennett

Bennett’s sentence is a tidy piece of war-politics rhetoric: a preemptive damage-control memo dressed as resolve. The triad of “long… expensive… difficult” functions like an inoculation. By naming the costs up front, he borrows credibility from candor, then converts that honesty into permission. You can’t accuse him of not warning you; you can only decide whether you’re tough enough to keep going.

The pivot phrase, “But in the end,” is where the real work happens. It compresses uncertainty into inevitability, a classic move when outcomes are unknowable but commitment is politically necessary. “Worth it” is intentionally vague - no metrics, no timetable, no definition of victory, no accounting for the moral cost. That vagueness is strategic. It invites listeners to fill in the blank with whatever payoff they already want: regional stability, democratization, deterrence, national pride, a sense of post-9/11 purpose.

The subtext is as much domestic as foreign: stay the course, accept the price, don’t flinch. In the early-to-mid Iraq War discourse, that posture mattered because support depended on narratives that could outlast messy facts: insurgency, sectarian violence, shifting rationales from WMD to nation-building. Bennett’s language treats those as temporary turbulence on a predetermined arc.

There’s also a quiet moral asymmetry embedded in “expensive.” It frames cost in dollars and duration, not bodies and trauma - a familiar political convenience. The line is designed to keep consensus intact by converting suffering into investment, and doubt into a character flaw.