Leadership Quote by Jim Gerlach

Freedom gets framed here less as a right than as a campaign with acceptable losses. Gerlach’s line borrows the moral glow of the word "freedom" and pairs it with the cold logistics of war: "hazards", "casualties", "threats of violence". The rhetoric is doing two jobs at once. It reassures American listeners that the project in Iraq is purposeful and historically inevitable ("march"), while preemptively normalizing the human cost as the price of admission.

The most telling move is the passive, bureaucratic cushioning. Casualties are not attached to agents or decision-makers; they simply exist, like weather. That grammar matters. It drains responsibility from the policy choices that create danger and relocates it onto a vague battlefield fate. Meanwhile, "Iraqis who participate in the election" are cast as courageous proxies for democratic legitimacy. Their participation becomes evidence that the intervention is working, which makes the risk to them politically useful: bravery under threat is the photo op democracy can’t resist.

Then comes the hard edge: "will be dealt with accordingly". It’s a phrase designed to sound firm without specifying what "accordingly" entails. That ambiguity signals force while sidestepping accountability. In the mid-2000s Iraq context, when insurgent violence and sectarian intimidation surrounded elections, the line functions as narrative control: elections equal freedom; violence equals illegitimacy; the state (and its backers) promise order. It’s not just persuasion; it’s insulation against doubt, built from lofty abstraction and carefully unclaimed consequences.