Politics & Power Quote by Carl Levin

Levin’s sentence is a master class in Washington’s pre-war rhetoric: it starts by laundering a contested claim through the language of consensus. “We begin with the common belief” is less a premise than a pressure tactic. It frames dissent as eccentricity or irresponsibility, nudging the audience to treat the rest as settled fact rather than an argument that needs proving. The verb “begin” matters, too: it implies the debate is already past the “whether” stage and has moved on to “what do we do about it.”

The structure piles up moral and procedural indictments in a tight braid. “Tyrant” supplies the ethical charge; “threat to the peace and stability” expands the target from Iraq to an entire region, widening the circle of supposed victims and justifying external action. Then comes the legitimacy scaffolding: “ignored the mandate of the United Nations.” That phrase recruits international law as a backdrop, even as the broader moment (early 2000s) was defined by anxiety that the U.S. might act without full UN sanction. It’s an argument designed to preempt the accusation of unilateralism by suggesting Iraq has already opted out of the rules.

The most consequential move is the pivot to “building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.” “Building” conveys urgency and momentum; “means of delivering” conjures missiles and reach. In retrospect, the subtext reads as an effort to fuse character judgment with imminent danger, making regime change feel like containment’s only logical endpoint. It’s not just describing a threat; it’s manufacturing the terms under which war becomes the reasonable position.