Politics & Power Quote by Howard Coble

There is a neat bit of Washington ventriloquism at work here: a politician insisting that politicians shouldn’t decide. Coble frames his agreement with President Bush as common-sense deference to expertise, but the real move is political laundering. By relocating agency to “the Pentagon,” he borrows the moral authority of soldiers and planners while insulating the administration (and himself) from the messier optics of ownership: casualties, timelines, and the creeping suspicion that “strategy” is just persistence with better branding.

The phrase “not politicians in Washington” is the tell. Coble is a Washington politician performing anti-Washington disgust, a ritual that plays especially well in wartime, when skepticism can be painted as softness and accountability can be dismissed as meddling. It sets up a false dichotomy between professional judgment and political decision-making, as if troop commitments aren’t inherently political acts with constitutional stakes. The Pentagon can advise, but the choice to fight, stay, surge, or withdraw is the definition of civilian responsibility.

Context matters: in the Iraq era, public confidence was fraying, and internal debate over troop levels and mission scope threatened to expose fractures inside the governing coalition. Coble’s line tries to freeze that debate by recoding it as inappropriate. It’s less about empowering generals than about disciplining dissent: if you question the war’s next phase, you’re not offering oversight; you’re “a politician in Washington.”