Politics & Power Quote by Raul Grijalva

Calling Iraq a "war of choice" is a scalpel, not a slogan. Raul Grijalva isn’t debating battlefield tactics; he’s indicting the decision-making ethic that made the invasion possible. "Choice" draws a bright line between necessity and preference, between self-defense and discretionary empire. It’s meant to puncture the post-9/11 haze in which the Iraq War was sold as inevitable, even fated. If it was chosen, it can be judged as a moral failure - and, crucially, a political one.

The phrase "undermining the very fabric of American society" stretches the battlefield into the living room. Grijalva’s intent is to argue that the real damage isn’t only Iraqi casualties or regional instability (though those haunt the sentence); it’s the corrosion at home: distrust in government after shifting rationales, the normalization of surveillance and executive overreach, the hemorrhaging of public funds from schools and infrastructure into contractors and deployments, the quiet rearrangement of civic priorities around permanent war. "Fabric" suggests something woven: institutions, norms, even shared reality. Pull a thread - propaganda, fear politics, scapegoating dissent - and the whole thing starts to fray.

Context matters. As a progressive House member in the Bush-era and post-Bush fallout, Grijalva is speaking into a national argument about legitimacy: preemption, WMD intelligence, and the cost of militarized foreign policy. The subtext is a warning about precedent. If leaders can choose a war on shaky grounds, then democratic consent becomes theater - and the damage doesn’t end when troops come home.