Politics & Power Quote by Jan Schakowsky

Three years in, and the line is doing what good political language always does: counting time to measure failure. Schakowsky isn’t describing Iraq so much as indicting Washington. “Three years into the war” is a quiet drumbeat of impatience, a way of saying the administration has spent its main currency - time, lives, legitimacy - and still can’t purchase control.

The sentence refuses the heroic vocabulary that sold the invasion. There’s no “mission,” no “progress,” no “turning a corner.” Instead, “tens of thousands” lands as a blunt, bureaucratic mass: not a triumphant army, but a vast exposure. The troops “remain targets,” a verb choice that flips the promised posture of dominance into vulnerability. It also sidesteps the sentimental register of sacrifice; “targets” is clinical, almost mechanical, which sharpens the moral charge. They are being left in a position where getting shot at is not a risk but a job description.

“Growing Iraqi insurgency” is the pivot. “Insurgency” concedes what early messaging tried to deny: this isn’t a tidy cleanup after victory, it’s a sustained, adaptive resistance. “Growing” implies momentum and, by implication, mismanagement. The subtext is not only that Americans are in danger, but that the war itself is generating conditions that make danger self-renewing.

In 2006-era debates, this kind of phrasing aimed to pry patriotism away from policy: you can support troops and still argue their continued deployment is the problem. The intent is accountability, delivered through the simplest metric politics can’t dodge: time passing, bodies exposed, no end in sight.