Success Quote by Peter Camejo

Strip away the diplomatic ribbon and Camejo is accusing U.S. foreign policy of doing what it often denies doing: treating “democracy” as branding while pursuing controllable outcomes. The bite of “not for” makes it a negation more than an argument; it’s designed to puncture the post-9/11 moral framing in one clean thrust. Then he lands the real charge: “puppet government.” That phrase isn’t neutral criticism; it’s a delegitimizing label that recasts any U.S.-backed Iraqi administration as a ventriloquist act, its sovereignty performed, not possessed.

The intent is less to litigate details than to collapse the entire justification for the Iraq War into a single hypocrisy claim. It works rhetorically because it taps a well-worn global suspicion: powerful states rarely spend blood and treasure to empower genuinely independent electorates. “Setting up” implies premeditation and engineering, not messy, contingent nation-building. “Puppet” implies not merely influence, but dependency so total that elections become theater.

Context matters. The quote echoes the early-2000s debate over weapons of mass destruction, oil interests, regional dominance, and the optics of “liberation.” As a political activist with populist instincts (despite the “businessman” tag), Camejo is speaking to an audience primed to distrust official narratives and to read U.S. intervention through the lens of Latin American coups, Cold War client states, and IMF-era “democratization” that still served external power.

The subtext is a warning: if democracy is deployed as a slogan for control, it doesn’t just fail abroad; it corrodes credibility at home.