Leadership Quote by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Zapatero’s line is a politician’s attempt to puncture the comforting fiction that war can be both surgical and morally disinfecting. By framing Iraq as the template, he’s not just talking about one conflict but about the post-9/11 doctrine that promised stability through force. The verb “proliferate” is the tell: it borrows the language of contagion and weapons spread, implying that violence reproduces itself like a virus once the conditions are right. War, in this view, is less a solution than an accelerant.

The intent is strategic as much as ethical. Zapatero governed Spain at a moment when the Iraq invasion had become a political litmus test across Europe: align with Washington’s hard-power narrative or stake out an alternative rooted in legitimacy, multilateralism, and domestic consent. His government’s withdrawal of Spanish troops in 2004 wasn’t merely a policy shift; it was a declaration that the “War on Terror” framing had turned counterproductive. This sentence offers the moral rationale in compact form.

The subtext is a rebuke to the idea of “liberation” delivered by cruise missile. It suggests that occupation and regime change don’t just topple states; they create power vacuums, humiliation economies, and recruitment pipelines for insurgencies. Notice the triad “hatred, violence and terror”: it broadens the indictment from battlefield casualties to the downstream politics of resentment and radicalization. In one stroke, he positions restraint not as weakness, but as realism about what war actually manufactures.