Daily Inspiration Quote by Otto Schily

Spoken with the clipped certainty of a security minister, Schily's line does two things at once: it names Iraq as a geopolitical crisis and, just as pointedly, shames anyone tempted to downplay it. "You'd have to be blind" isn't just emphasis; it's a rhetorical cudgel. It frames dissent not as an alternate analysis but as a failure of perception, a moral and cognitive defect. That's the tell: the quote isn't aimed at terrorists so much as at domestic audiences who want to believe the Iraq war is containable, distant, or already "handled."

The key phrase is "magnet and generating force". Magnet suggests attraction: Iraq drawing militants, money, and attention the way a spectacle draws a crowd. Generating force is more damning, implying the conflict doesn't merely host terrorism, it manufactures it - training, radicalization, recruitment, status. The subtext is a critique of interventionist optimism, the idea that toppling a regime would drain extremism rather than concentrate it. Schily's language also carries an implicit warning about blowback: a far-off war becomes an engine that exports risk back into European cities.

Context matters: as a German public servant in the post-9/11 era, Schily is balancing alliance politics with domestic skepticism about Iraq. He can't sound anti-American in a slogan-y way; instead, he makes an argument from security pragmatism. The force of the quote comes from that pragmatic moralism: see what's happening, or admit you're choosing not to.