War & Peace Quote by Ed Harris

Ed Harris is doing something rarer than political dunking: he’s indicting the machinery that makes a war feel pre-approved. The charge isn’t simply that George W. Bush pushed for Iraq. It’s that the “mainstream media” treated the push as inherently reasonable from day one, granting it the kind of default authority that turns a radical act into a baseline policy option. “Total credibility” lands like a verdict. It implies not just coverage, but credentialing: the press as an institution that confers legitimacy before evidence is even on the table.

The emotional engine of the quote is the plainspoken bewilderment of “I didn’t get it then, and I don’t get it now.” Harris isn’t performing hindsight wisdom; he’s describing a sustained, unresolved dissonance. That repetition matters. It frames the Iraq lead-up not as a one-off failure but as a pattern the culture never fully metabolized. The subtext is frustration with how quickly elite consensus forms in moments of fear, and how easily skepticism gets coded as unserious, unpatriotic, or naive.

Context is everything: early post-9/11 America, when access journalism, official sources, and the ratings logic of “breaking news” fused into a conveyor belt for administration claims. Harris’s actorly instinct shows in the way he narrates credibility as a kind of casting choice: who gets to be believable on the national stage, who gets treated as noise, and how the press can mistake proximity to power for truth. The quote hits because it refuses closure. The scandal, for Harris, isn’t only what happened; it’s that the conditions that enabled it still feel intact.