War & Peace Quote by Lisa Murkowski

“The war against terrorism is one we must win” is the kind of post-9/11 political sentence engineered to feel non-negotiable. Murkowski isn’t outlining a policy so much as closing off alternatives. “War” turns a diffuse, borderless threat into a familiar script with clear roles: commanders, enemies, victories. “Against terrorism” keeps the object abstract enough to absorb shifting targets, letting strategy flex without admitting recalibration. The brilliance, and the danger, is that the phrasing makes permanence sound like principle.

The subtext is coalition maintenance. “We” invites bipartisan consent and public unity, but it also drafts listeners into shared responsibility for whatever follows: surveillance expansions, military deployments, security funding, tightened immigration rules. “Must” does the coercive work quietly, implying that dissent is not just disagreement but irresponsibility. “Win” delivers emotional closure in a conflict structurally designed to resist closure; terrorism is a tactic, not a country that can sign a surrender.

Context matters: a Republican senator from Alaska speaking in an era when national security rhetoric was a political solvent, dissolving complicated tradeoffs into moral urgency. Murkowski’s line fits the broader Washington vocabulary that treated security as a sacred category, where costs could be deferred and metrics left vague. It’s effective because it sounds like resolve, not ambiguity - even as it relies on ambiguity to keep the resolve endlessly fundable.