Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

The sentence is engineered to sound like a polite invitation while functioning as a pressure campaign. Cheney doesn’t argue for the Iraq project so much as draft a roster: “all democratic nations” and “the United Nations” are hailed as a moral bloc, implicitly daring any holdout to explain why it doesn’t belong. The phrase “urge” is doing quiet work too. It frames U.S. policy not as coercion but as responsible leadership - the kind that merely encourages others to do what decency already requires.

The most loaded noun is “call.” By rooting the request in the “Iraqi Governing Council,” Cheney tries to launder legitimacy through an Iraqi intermediary. The Council, created under U.S. occupation, becomes the ventriloquist’s proof that the puppet is speaking. That’s the subtext: this isn’t Washington asking for help cleaning up a war it initiated; it’s Iraq asking the world to show up for Iraq.

“Support” is strategically nonspecific. It can mean money, troops, debt relief, political cover, or simply a diplomatic photo-op. Vagueness is the point: it widens the coalition while narrowing accountability.

Then comes the ethical master key: “transition to democracy.” It recasts a contested occupation into a universally saleable narrative arc, with “the people of Iraq” positioned as beneficiaries rather than agents with competing visions. In the post-2003 context - growing insurgency, international skepticism, and a legitimacy deficit for the invasion - the line reads as an attempt to convert backlash into burden-sharing, wrapping realpolitik in the language of civic redemption.