War & Peace Quote by Xavier Becerra

The line is engineered to do two things at once: condemn the Iraq War without sounding like it’s condemning the people who fought it. “We cannot undo the past” is a moral throat-clearing, a way of acknowledging irreversible damage while sidestepping the temptation to litigate every decision that led there. It’s resignation as rhetoric: a reminder that the dead stay dead, the displaced stay displaced, and the geopolitical aftershocks don’t politely rewind because a vote changes hands.

The sharper blade is “misguided.” It’s a politician’s most useful scalpel: judgment without full indictment. “Illegal” would pick a fight with institutions; “criminal” would demand accountability; “misguided” lets you signal opposition while leaving room for colleagues, donors, and voters who once supported the invasion to join you without humiliation. It frames the war as a mistake of direction, not necessarily of character.

Context matters. For a Democratic politician of Becerra’s generation, Iraq is a defining cautionary tale: intelligence failures, shifting justifications, civilian casualties, and the long hangover of nation-building rhetoric. The subtext is policy triage. If the past can’t be undone, the argument becomes about what can still be done: ending open-ended commitments, caring for veterans, repairing alliances, and absorbing the lesson that certainty in Washington can be more dangerous than doubt. The “we” is the tell: collective ownership, carefully distributed, because responsibility is politically radioactive but unavoidable.