Politics & Power Quote by Todd Tiahrt

The line is engineered to turn a messy, asymmetrical threat into something legible: a classic war story with a clear enemy, clear innocence, and clear stakes. “Well, today” plants the listener in an urgent present tense, implying that hesitation is naïve. The phrase “struggle brought on to us” is doing quiet but heavy lifting: it preemptively rejects any conversation about U.S. policy, blowback, or complexity. If it was “brought on,” then it can’t be traced back to choices, alliances, or prior interventions.

Calling the adversary “the terrorists of Islam” is the most consequential move. It collapses a fringe tactic (terrorism) into a civilizational label (Islam), widening the target while keeping plausible deniability: it’s not “Muslims,” it’s “terrorists,” except the grammar yokes them together anyway. That rhetorical fusion helps justify a broad security posture at home and abroad, because the enemy becomes not a network but an identity-adjacent force.

“It is a war that we did not choose” borrows moral authority from victimhood. “Declared against us as Americans” shifts the frame from geopolitics to personal identity, and “against our Constitution” makes dissent sound like constitutional negligence. The subtext is political triage: unify the base, marginalize critics, and sanctify extraordinary measures by casting them as defensive patriotism.

Contextually, this is post-9/11 language architecture: the “War on Terror” era’s signature move of turning fear into consensus, and consensus into policy permission slips.