"There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers"
About this Quote
Ignatieff’s line is engineered to short-circuit the most common alibi for avoiding war: the price tag. By conceding “There’s a financial cost” and instantly demoting it, he performs a moral pivot that’s also a political one. Money is framed as abstract, replenishable, almost cosmetic. Soldiers are framed as the irreducible currency of state action: bodies, families, amputations, funerals, decades of care. The sentence tightens around a blunt hierarchy of value, insisting that the only accounting that matters is paid in human risk.
The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To hawks, it offers ethical cover: if you must spend anything, spend dollars, not lives, and measure seriousness by your willingness to shoulder casualties. To skeptics, it tries to preempt the “waste” argument by relocating the debate from budgets to responsibility: if you oppose the mission, do it on moral and strategic grounds, not because it’s expensive. That move is shrewd because fiscal arguments can sound petty next to death; he’s raising the rhetorical stakes.
Context matters: Ignatieff built a public identity as a human-rights intellectual turned politician, speaking in an era when Western interventions were sold as limited, technocratic, and “cost-effective” operations. This sentence rebukes that fantasy. It also quietly sanitizes other “real” costs - civilian deaths, displacement, trauma - by narrowing the ledger to “our soldiers.” The possessive pronoun is the tell: empathy is nationalized, and the moral balance sheet is written from the metropole outward.
The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To hawks, it offers ethical cover: if you must spend anything, spend dollars, not lives, and measure seriousness by your willingness to shoulder casualties. To skeptics, it tries to preempt the “waste” argument by relocating the debate from budgets to responsibility: if you oppose the mission, do it on moral and strategic grounds, not because it’s expensive. That move is shrewd because fiscal arguments can sound petty next to death; he’s raising the rhetorical stakes.
Context matters: Ignatieff built a public identity as a human-rights intellectual turned politician, speaking in an era when Western interventions were sold as limited, technocratic, and “cost-effective” operations. This sentence rebukes that fantasy. It also quietly sanitizes other “real” costs - civilian deaths, displacement, trauma - by narrowing the ledger to “our soldiers.” The possessive pronoun is the tell: empathy is nationalized, and the moral balance sheet is written from the metropole outward.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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