War & Peace Quote by Brent Scowcroft

Scowcroft’s sentence doesn’t argue Iraq is harmless; it argues the obsession is strategically stupid. The knife twist is in his calm certainty: “any campaign,” “whatever the strategy, cost and risks,” “is certain.” That piling-up of caveats is a rhetorical preemption strike. He’s telling Washington: I’m not debating your PowerPoint. I’m questioning your premise.

The specific intent is warning-by-reframing. Post-9/11 politics wanted a clean narrative arc: hit the perpetrators, then topple a dictator, then call it a safer world. Scowcroft, a national security insider with credibility in Republican circles, insists on a less cinematic truth: attention is finite. Military bandwidth, intelligence focus, diplomatic capital, and public patience all get spent. Iraq, in his telling, is not merely another front; it becomes the front that crowds out the actual mission.

The subtext is institutional memory pushing back against adrenaline. Scowcroft had watched Vietnam-era “mission creep,” and he understood bureaucratic gravity: once the U.S. commits, it doesn’t “dabble.” “Indefinite period” is doing quiet, devastating work. It signals not just a long war, but a long afterlife of occupation, nation-building, and blowback that will reorganize priorities no matter what officials promise at the outset.

Context matters: this is the early-2000s debate over preemption and regime change, when “war on terrorism” was both a security agenda and a political brand. Scowcroft punctures the brand by treating it like a resource allocation problem. That’s why the line lands: it’s a sober insider speaking the heresy that a superpower can lose by getting busy.