Daily Inspiration Quote by Condoleezza Rice

Uncertainty gets dressed up as urgency here, and that wardrobe choice mattered. Rice is speaking in the pre-Iraq War atmosphere when the U.S. case for action hinged on weapons that inspectors couldn’t conclusively locate. The line’s engine is a carefully engineered gap: “unaccounted-for” doesn’t claim missiles are poised and ready; it claims the paperwork is missing. That’s a subtle but potent pivot, because absence of evidence becomes evidence of danger.

The phrasing is bureaucratic on purpose. “Scud and other ballistic missiles” invokes a recognizable threat from the Gulf War era, a callback that primes public memory: these are not abstract “capabilities,” but the kind of hardware Americans already associate with televised conflict. Then she narrows the field of acceptable knowledge: since 1998, “no way” to get “even minimal information” except “through intelligence means.” That move does two things at once. It preemptively discredits slower, verifiable channels (inspections, diplomacy, international monitoring) while elevating intelligence as the only remaining instrument - even though intelligence, by nature, is partially opaque and hard to independently test.

The subtext is a rationale for unilateral confidence: trust us, because you can’t see what we see, and you can’t see it because the system that would let you see it is gone. Contextually, it leans on Iraq’s history of obstruction and on the post-9/11 appetite for preemption. The rhetorical trick is turning “we don’t know” into “we can’t wait,” converting epistemic limits into policy momentum.