Politics & Power Quote by Jim DeMint

DeMint frames Iraq not as a complicated nation emerging from invasion and occupation, but as a stage for an American political morality play. The line opens with “celebration of hope,” a phrase calibrated for television: upbeat enough to preempt skepticism, vague enough to float above the mess on the ground. “Can now take control” does the heavy lifting. It implies a clean handoff, as if history flips from dependency to self-determination in a single, photogenic moment. The subtext is reassurance: to Americans uneasy about the costs and chaos, this is the story you were promised, still intact.

Then he fuses Iraqi sovereignty to a distinctly American founding-language template: “rights endowed to us by our creator - life, liberty and freedom.” That move is strategic. By invoking a Creator, he wraps democratization in sacred legitimacy, deflecting the charge that it’s a foreign imposition. By echoing Jefferson (“life, liberty...”), he quietly recasts Iraqi political development as an extension of American identity, not Iraqi particularity. It’s less about Iraq’s institutions than about America’s self-image as a midwife to liberty.

The context matters: DeMint was a Republican politician speaking in an era when the Iraq War’s justification had shifted from weapons and security to democracy and human rights. This rhetoric is designed to retroactively dignify the project. Hope becomes a substitute for accountability; “freedom” becomes a solvent that dissolves sectarianism, state capacity, and the grim mechanics of rebuilding. The quote works because it sells redemption in familiar words, even if the reality required unfamiliar compromises.