Leadership Quote by Carl Levin

Levin’s line is built to do two jobs at once: mourn and mobilize. By yoking September 11th to “courageous actions” in Afghanistan and Iraq, he converts a discrete act of terror into a longer moral narrative, one that grants the wars an inherited legitimacy from the shock of that morning. The rhetoric is tidy: tragedy produces clarity; clarity demands action; action becomes proof of virtue.

The key phrase is “friends of tyranny and enemies of freedom.” It’s not descriptive so much as disciplinary. The wording flattens a messy geopolitical landscape into two camps, encouraging listeners to sort actors - and, implicitly, critics - by moral alignment rather than by strategy, evidence, or outcomes. “Still exist” adds a drumbeat of permanence: this is not a crisis with an exit ramp but a condition of modern life, making sustained military engagement feel less like a choice than a civic obligation.

Context matters. Levin was a Democratic senator associated with defense oversight, speaking in an era when bipartisan consensus around the War on Terror was forged through a vocabulary of freedom under siege. The sentence reflects that post-9/11 political technology: keep the emotional memory of the attacks close, elevate the troops as moral ballast, then widen the frame to a timeless struggle against tyranny. It’s persuasive because it offers order in a moment defined by fear and uncertainty, even as it sidesteps the harder question the public would later demand: what, exactly, did these wars accomplish, and at what cost?