War & Peace Quote by Todd Tiahrt

The sentence performs the classic post-9/11 rhetorical pivot: it’s ostensibly about tactics, but it’s really about permission. Todd Tiahrt frames policy as a moral referendum forced on a besieged nation: "Today, we are now deciding" suggests urgency and inevitability, as if deliberation itself is a wartime luxury. The clunky repetition ("today", "now") reads less like eloquence than a pressure tactic, tightening the clock so dissent feels like delay.

Notice how agency is distributed. "Those who are choosing to carry out a war against us" makes the enemy’s intent volitional and ideological, not situational. They’re not reacting to specific U.S. actions; they’re "choosing" to attack "what we believe and who we are". That move swaps geopolitics for identity, turning counterterrorism into a defense of essence. Once the conflict is about "who we are", almost any measure can be recast as self-preservation rather than state power.

"Non-U.S. citizens" does quiet but consequential work. It narrows the circle of rights-bearing subjects and primes the audience for exceptional legal categories: different rules for different people. The phrase "how do we treat" signals detention, interrogation, surveillance - the whole apparatus of the War on Terror - without naming the controversial parts. Even "try to find these terrorists" softens the machinery with a modest verb ("try") while keeping the target label absolute ("these terrorists"), discouraging doubts about certainty, due process, or collateral damage.

The context is an America redefining security as identity management, and asking the public to accept that the hardest choices aren’t whether to expand state power, but whether to do it "the right way."