Leadership Quote by Peter DeFazio

There is a deliberate sobriety to DeFazio's phrasing: it’s not “should not,” but “cannot.” That single word shifts the claim from moral argument to limits-of-power realism, a move designed to puncture the post-9/11 faith that American capability is synonymous with American destiny. “Impose” is the tell, too. It casts the U.S. not as a liberator but as an actor trying to install abstract outcomes like a prefabricated government, and it hints at the arrogance embedded in the project without needing to say “hubris.”

The trio “freedom, security, and unity” reads like a greatest-hits list of nation-building promises. DeFazio bundles them because they are politically inseparable: freedom without security looks like chaos; security without freedom looks like occupation; unity without both is a fantasy. By stacking them, he implies the entire package is suspect, not just one failing policy. The line also exposes a quiet contradiction at the heart of the Iraq War pitch: you can topple a regime quickly with force, but you can’t manufacture legitimacy, trust, or shared national identity at gunpoint. Violence may remove obstacles; it cannot create consent.

Context matters: as a politician, DeFazio is speaking into an American debate where “support the troops” rhetoric often blurred into “support the strategy.” His intent is to carve out a critique that reads as pragmatic rather than purely ideological: withdrawal or restraint isn’t softness, it’s recognition that coercion can win battles while sabotaging the very civic fabric those lofty nouns require.