Politics & Power Quote by Peter King

King’s sentence is built like a legal brief, and that’s the point: to convert a messy, choice-laden war into an unavoidable administrative response. Notice how agency is distributed. “We went into Iraq” sounds collective and democratic, but it quickly slides into Saddam as the active party: he “refused,” “violated,” “consistently” erred. The invasion becomes less a decision than a consequence, a penalty assessed after repeated infractions.

The core rhetorical move is “account for his weapons of mass destruction.” It doesn’t assert the weapons exist; it asserts a failure of accounting. That’s a clever piece of post-hoc insulation. If the weapons aren’t found, the argument pivots: the casus belli was not certainty, but noncompliance and suspicion. The UN resolutions line adds international paperwork as moral ballast, framing the U.S. as enforcing a rules-based order rather than pursuing power or revenge.

Then comes the emotional keystone: “in a post-9/11 world.” This phrase isn’t evidence; it’s atmosphere. It asks the listener to remember fear as a form of proof, to treat caution as weakness. “No American president could afford” shifts responsibility again, this time onto political survival. The subtext is blunt: even if doubt existed, the domestic cost of restraint was too high. That’s less a defense of the war’s truth claims than of the incentives that made the war politically rational.

Context matters: this is a justification designed for an era when the WMD rationale was collapsing, and when reputational salvage required reframing the invasion as a prudential act under radical uncertainty.