War & Peace Quote by Douglas Feith

The sentence is engineered to sound like reassurance while quietly preempting doubt. Feith strings together “friends” and “allies” like a protective charm, repeating the phrase until it becomes less a factual claim than a mood: don’t picture unilateral invasion; picture a familiar, clubby West moving in consensus. The word “operate” does heavy lifting here. It’s bureaucratic, antiseptic, and managerial - war as a procedure, not a rupture. That diction shifts attention from moral argument (should we?) to process legitimacy (we know how to do this).

The real intent is to launder a future choice through the authority of habit. “That’s been true for decades” invokes inherited trust: if America has usually had partners, then this next campaign should be assumed to fit the same pattern. It’s an appeal to continuity aimed at an anxious public and wary diplomats, a rhetorical substitute for hard evidence about necessity, planning, or aftermath.

The subtext is more brittle: allies are not just companions but validation. By promising coalition-ness in advance - “if we wind up going to war... it will be true in Iraq” - Feith tries to make political isolation sound impossible, even as 2002-03 was defined by fractures inside NATO and the scramble for a “coalition of the willing.” The conditional “if” also performs innocence, as though war might simply happen to the administration rather than be selected.

In context, it’s strategic messaging from a senior Pentagon figure during the run-up to the Iraq invasion: a preemptive answer to the charge of going it alone, and a way to frame legitimacy as a social fact (“we have friends”) rather than a legal or ethical one.