Politics & Power Quote by John Boehner

Patriotism does a lot of work here, but the real engine is reassurance. Boehner’s line is built to dignify a difficult, costly project by narrating it as morally simple: mission, commitment, real difference, freedom versus tyranny. The syntax stacks certainties on certainties, as if repetition can drown out doubt. “They know” is the key move. It’s not an argument; it’s a stamp of confidence placed on the troops themselves, deputizing their presumed conviction as proof that the policy is sound.

The subtext is domestic. This kind of language is less about persuading foreign audiences than consolidating support at home and protecting leaders from the messiness of war’s outcomes. “Combating and defeating terrorism abroad” frames the fight as both proactive and finite, promising closure while sidestepping the reality that terrorism is tactic and network, not a single enemy that signs surrender papers. It also quietly recasts intervention as defense, turning geopolitical choice into existential necessity.

“Bringing freedom” is the soft-focus phrase that makes the hardest questions disappear: whose freedom, under what governance, at what civilian cost, for how long. The line’s most revealing claim is that the region has “known only tyranny,” a sweeping generalization that flattens history into a usable moral backdrop. In the post-9/11 political era and the Iraq/Afghanistan years, that flattening wasn’t incidental; it was the rhetorical price of keeping a complicated, contested war legible as virtue.