Politics & Power Quote by Howard Fineman

“Greeted as liberators” is the kind of sunny prophecy that begs to be read as political screenplay: a war sold as a feel-good reveal, with history applauding on cue. Fineman isn’t celebrating it. As a journalist flagging Bush’s claim, he’s capturing the rhetorical move that made the Iraq invasion marketable to a skeptical public: collapse a violent, unpredictable occupation into a single, emotionally satisfying image of gratitude. It’s not policy; it’s narrative closure.

The intent is diagnostic. By quoting the promise, Fineman spotlights how the administration tried to pre-load the verdict of the war into its opening scene. If Iraqis cheer, then the invasion becomes self-justifying; it “proves” itself. That word does a lot of work. Proof is what you cite after the fact, not what you announce before the first Humvee crosses the border. The subtext is an effort to outsource moral legitimacy to the imagined reactions of Iraqis, as if consent can be presumed and then used retroactively as a receipt.

Context matters: early-2000s post-9/11 politics, a hunger for clarity, and a media environment where confident forecasts were treated like credible intelligence. The line also reveals a classic vulnerability of war rhetoric: it frames liberation as a greeting, not a long, messy political process. When reality doesn’t match the tableau, the promise doesn’t just fail; it curdles, turning triumphalist certainty into an indictment of the certainty itself.