War & Peace Quote by Craig Bruce

Craig Bruce’s line is built to sting because it mimics the lazy logic it wants to expose. It takes the “war on terrorism” framing at face value, then pushes it one step further until it collapses under its own weight: if terrorism is like crime, and crime is ineradicable, then the whole project is pointless. The argument is deliberately obnoxious, a rhetorical trap designed to force the reader to notice how absolutist goals (“eradicate,” “end,” “defeat”) distort policy into permanent emergency.

The subtext isn’t “do nothing.” It’s a critique of how political language manufactures unrealistic benchmarks, then uses inevitable failure as justification for endless expansion: bigger budgets, broader surveillance, looser rules of engagement, more wars without endpoints. By comparing terrorism to crime, Bruce drags it out of the mythic realm of existential conflict and into the mundane reality of risk management. We don’t “win” against crime; we reduce it, contain it, adapt to it, and argue constantly about what trade-offs are acceptable.

Context matters: post-9/11 politics leaned hard on the promise of total security, a promise that’s emotionally soothing and strategically impossible. Bruce’s provocation targets that seduction. It also needles the moral theatre of calling something a “war,” which licenses extraordinary measures and simplifies messy causes into a single villain. The quote works because it forces a choice: either admit the goal is not eradication but mitigation, or keep pretending a forever-war can be measured like a scoreboard.