Politics & Power Quote by Douglas Feith

Feith’s sentence is a bureaucratic hall of mirrors: the point isn’t disarmament, it’s the performance of disarmament. “Demonstrate to the world” appears twice in one breath, like a nervous tic, signaling that the true audience is global opinion and, more pointedly, Washington’s need for a clean narrative. UN inspectors aren’t framed as independent verifiers; they’re cast as props who can “help the Iraqi government demonstrate” cooperation. The grammar quietly relocates authority from inspectors to the regime they’re inspecting.

The key hedge is the conditional: “if that is in fact what the Iraqi government decides to do.” On paper it sounds fair-minded, a nod to Iraqi agency. In practice it’s a preemptive escape hatch. If Iraq complies, inspectors validate a story of responsible disarmament; if Iraq doesn’t, the sentence has already defined noncompliance as a choice, a willful refusal, priming the moral logic for escalation. Either outcome can be narrated as confirmation.

Context matters: this is the early-2000s disarmament drama, where “process” was inseparable from “case.” Feith, associated with the harder edge of U.S. national security policymaking, speaks in a language designed to travel well on briefing slides: cooperation, demonstration, decision. The subtext is that the inspection regime is less about discovering facts than about manufacturing legitimacy. The phrasing doesn’t merely describe what inspectors do; it narrows their role to a public-relations instrument in a confrontation already being scripted.