Politics & Power Quote by Sue Kelly

Calling the War on Terror “one of the most critical national security efforts in our history” isn’t just praise; it’s a scale-setting move. Sue Kelly, speaking as a politician in the post-9/11 atmosphere, reaches for the biggest available frame: History. That single word inflates the policy from a set of tactics and budgets into a generational mission, the kind that asks citizens to accept permanent tradeoffs because the stakes have been pre-certified as existential.

The wording is careful in its vagueness. “Effort” is elastic: it can mean military invasions, intelligence expansion, domestic surveillance, airport security theater, diplomatic pressure, and an open-ended set of future actions that haven’t been debated yet. The phrase sidesteps the messier question of outcomes - whether the effort is effective, proportional, or strategically coherent - and centers intention and urgency. “Critical” does the emotional work of crisis without naming a specific threat landscape, which helps keep the mandate broad even as targets and tactics shift.

The subtext is a political permission slip. By positioning the War on Terror alongside America’s defining national-security chapters, Kelly implicitly rebukes dissent as small-minded or even risky: if this is “one of the most critical” fights, then skepticism starts to look like irresponsibility. It’s also a coalition-building line, designed to fuse patriotic identity to policy support, and to place ordinary legislative disagreements under the moral shadow of national survival. In that era, rhetoric like this didn’t just describe the moment; it helped lock it in.