Success Quote by Judd Gregg

The line is engineered to do two things at once: sanitize the motive and preempt the verdict. By framing the Iraq War as an altruistic “change” project aimed at a “totalitarian, despotic regime,” Gregg borrows the moral clarity of anti-tyranny rhetoric to launder a far messier policy record. “Invaded” is blunt, but it’s immediately cushioned by a purpose clause that converts force into reform. It’s the political equivalent of swapping “broke in” for “rescued.”

The real pivot is the second half: “we have been successful there.” Successful at what, exactly? The sentence refuses to specify metrics because specificity invites argument: civilian casualties, sectarian violence, institutional collapse, the rise of insurgency, regional destabilization, the long tail of veteran care and fiscal cost. “There” is a deliberate blur, turning a country into a scoreboard without revealing the score. It’s a claim built for cable-news pacing, not policy audit.

Context matters: Gregg, a Republican senator, was speaking from within a post-9/11 political culture that treated dissent as disloyalty and demanded optimistic narratives to justify sunk costs. The subtext is managerial reassurance: history is still on our side, and the decision-makers should not be dragged back into the dock. It’s less an argument than an attempted closure, insisting the debate is already settled even as the facts on the ground were still painfully unsettled.