Politics & Power Quote by Paul Cellucci

War rhetoric rarely multitasks this hard. Cellucci’s sentence is built like a legal brief masquerading as moral clarity: “liberate Iraq” supplies the uplifting purpose, while “protect the people of the United States and other countries” expands the constituency beyond national self-interest. Then comes the engine of the argument: “weapons of mass destruction,” a phrase doing double duty as both evidence and incantation, meant to shut down ambiguity by invoking scale, urgency, and fear.

The subtext is a careful fusion of altruism and preemption. “Liberate” implies Iraqis are victims; “protect” implies Americans are next. That pairing manufactures consent by making the war simultaneously humanitarian and defensive. It also launders contingency into certainty: note the hypothetical structure baked into “being used by terrorists or the Iraqi government.” The threat isn’t described as imminent proof so much as plausible catastrophe, a wager sold as necessity. “Devastating impact” and “kill thousands of innocent civilians” are moral accelerants, pushing the listener toward a binary choice: act now or be complicit later.

Context matters: this is post-9/11 political language from the run-up and early period of the Iraq War, when public trust was leveraged through worst-case scenarios. The line’s most revealing feature is how it pre-assigns innocence and guilt. “Innocent civilians” appear only as potential victims of Iraq, never as potential victims of the war itself. That omission isn’t accidental; it’s the quiet architecture of persuasion, narrowing what counts as safety, and for whom.