War & Peace Quote by Marsha Blackburn

Blackburn’s language borrows the moral clarity of wartime rhetoric, then quietly smuggles in its real purpose: making dissent feel like dereliction. “Global war on terror” is a framing device more than a description, expanding a set of discrete conflicts into a single, borderless emergency. Once the fight is “global,” any battlefield can be presented as necessary; once it’s a “war,” the usual democratic friction - skepticism, oversight, even impatience - can be cast as weakness.

The double insistence - “important, it is imperative” - is doing political work. “Important” is debatable; “imperative” pretends the debate is over. The repetition of “win in the battles” turns policy into a scoreboard, stripping away the messy questions of aims, exit ramps, and costs. “Battles in Afghanistan” and “battles in Iraq” are placed side by side as if their rationales are interchangeable, an early-2000s move meant to keep the post-9/11 emotional momentum from separating one war from the other.

Even the collegial nod - “as the gentleman from Georgia has mentioned” - signals coalition-building inside Congress, anchoring her argument in institutional consensus rather than evidence. Then comes the inoculation: “not something that is going to be quick and easy.” That line lowers expectations preemptively, translating open-ended commitment into a virtue. It’s a way of redefining duration and difficulty not as warning signs, but as proof of seriousness - and, by implication, proof that critics don’t understand the stakes.