War & Peace Quote by George W. Bush

It lands like a door slam: no ambiguity, no bargaining, no middle ground. Bush’s line takes the raw chaos of 9/11 and compresses it into a clean civic story with a single turning point. “Declared war” isn’t just description; it’s a legal and moral reclassification. Terrorism becomes an act of war, and that shift does real work: it licenses extraordinary state power, recasts policing as combat, and pulls the public from grief into a posture of national unity and resolve.

The syntax is built for inevitability. “With those attacks” makes the enemy’s action the trigger, not America’s choice. Responsibility is pre-assigned. “The terrorists and their supporters” widens the target set beyond the hijackers to anyone adjacent - a phrase that quietly anticipates the coming logic of networks, safe havens, and states accused of harboring them. It’s elastic enough to justify a long campaign with moving boundaries.

Then the clincher: “And war is what they got.” The blunt, almost conversational cadence reads like payback, a promise delivered in the language of the backyard rather than the briefing room. That rhetorical folksiness matters: it turns geopolitics into something emotionally legible, even satisfying, while sidestepping questions about duration, proportionality, or endpoints.

Context makes the line even sharper. In the early post-9/11 atmosphere, the public wanted clarity and consequence. Bush offers both, framing retaliation as not only necessary but already decided, as if history itself has handed down the sentence.