War & Peace Quote by Ed Gillespie

The line is built like a dare: accept our faraway war, or brace for carnage at home. Gillespie’s genius here isn’t policy detail; it’s geographic substitution. “Baghdad and Kabul” aren’t just place names, they’re shorthand for a morally uncomplicated battlefield where “terror” can be treated as an external contagion. “Baltimore and Kansas” aren’t literal targets so much as a map of American self-image: a big, majority-Black city paired with an all-purpose heartland signifier. City and prairie, anxiety and innocence, stitched together to imply that no one is exempt.

The intent is to harden consent. By framing the choice as preventive violence abroad versus inevitable violence at home, the quote collapses complex questions about intelligence failures, blowback, alliances, and state-building into a single binary: fight them there or face them here. That construction pressures skeptics into seeming reckless. Who wants to be the person who “let” terror reach “Kansas”?

The subtext is about credibility and fear management in the post-9/11 political economy, when “war on terror” functioned as both security doctrine and electoral posture. Gillespie speaks in the plural - “They do believe” - laundering a partisan argument through the aura of collective wisdom, as if the conclusion is self-evident among serious people. It’s an appeal to imagined inevitability: history is coming, pick your battlefield.