Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas Feith

A sentence like this is built to sound like intelligence without having to bear intelligence's burden: specificity. Feith's "We know" performs certainty, then immediately launders it through the foggy pluralities of "various activities" and "important to the insurgents". It's a rhetorical two-step that lets a policymaker project command of the situation while keeping the claim conveniently unfalsifiable. If you're challenged, you can always say the activities were classified, evolving, or misunderstood by the questioner.

The subtext is less about Iraq's insurgency than about Syria's culpability. By placing "Iraq" and "Syria" in the same breath, the line invites the audience to draw a straight line from cross-border movement to moral and strategic blame. "Occurring in Syria" is deliberately passive; it avoids saying the Syrian state is directing anything, while still making Syria feel like the stage on which the problem is being rehearsed and supplied.

Context matters: early-2000s Washington was hungry for connective tissue linking disparate threats into a single, legible narrative. In that climate, ambiguity wasn't a bug, it was a feature. A claim that stops short of alleging command-and-control can still justify pressure, sanctions, covert action, or diplomatic isolation. Feith's phrasing is the bureaucratic cousin of a wink: enough to harden public suspicion, not enough to be pinned down.