War & Peace Quote by Geraldo Rivera

Rivera’s line is built like a rhetorical pressure valve: it releases political heat by rerouting it into sentiment. Dropping “Katrina and Iraq” in the same breath pins 2005 as a year of compounded national failure, then pivots to a claim that sounds pragmatic but is also quietly revisionist: “How the war ends is more important than how it began.” The subtext is permission. You can stop litigating the original sales pitch, the intelligence, the speeches, the mission creep. What matters now is resolution, not accountability.

That move matters because it reframes critique as indulgence in the past. It’s a classic media-era strategy for managing a divided audience: shift from causes to consequences, from blame to closure. Rivera isn’t arguing policy so much as asserting a moral hierarchy. If you keep asking how it began, you risk looking unserious about endings: withdrawal, stability, victory, whatever definition is politically survivable.

Then comes the unifying hook: “However you feel about the war...” This is the inoculation phrase, meant to disarm both sides, followed by the safest bipartisan currency in American public life: support the troops. Compassion becomes the shared ground that allows disagreement without rupture, but it also subtly polices the terms of dissent. If opposition can be portrayed as insufficiently “loving,” the debate shifts from strategy and legitimacy to personal decency.

In a moment when Katrina exposed who the state protects and Iraq exposed how the state lies, Rivera offers a consoling script: argue later, care now. It’s soothing, and that’s precisely its power - and its risk.