"I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs"
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Cole’s line lands because it turns a foreign-policy failure into an accusation of imagination: the people in charge weren’t merely wrong, they were incurious. “Didn’t understand Iraqi society” is a measured academic phrasing, but it carries a prosecutorial edge. He’s not claiming Iraq was unknowable; he’s saying the decision-makers chose not to know. That distinction matters. Ignorance here isn’t an accident of complexity, it’s a policy choice.
The “blank slate” metaphor is doing the real work. It names a habit of empire dressed up as managerial confidence: if a place is treated as empty, its histories, factions, religious authorities, class structures, and grievances become optional reading. You can swap in templates - shock-and-awe followed by rapid privatization, top-down democratization, imported institutions - and assume the local population will adapt like compliant users to a new operating system. Cole’s framing implicitly indicts the technocratic faith of the early 2000s, where “nation-building” was sold less as politics than as project management.
Then he twists the knife: “guinea pigs.” It’s a moral charge, not just an analytic one. The metaphor suggests experiments conducted at a safe distance, with consequences borne by the subjects rather than the experimenters. Contextually, it echoes the post-invasion arc of Iraq: disbanding the army, de-Baathification, the underestimation of sectarian and nationalist dynamics, and the ensuing spiral into insurgency and civil conflict. Cole’s intent is to reframe the catastrophe as arrogance masquerading as strategy - and to make that arrogance sound as ethically grotesque as it was geopolitically costly.
The “blank slate” metaphor is doing the real work. It names a habit of empire dressed up as managerial confidence: if a place is treated as empty, its histories, factions, religious authorities, class structures, and grievances become optional reading. You can swap in templates - shock-and-awe followed by rapid privatization, top-down democratization, imported institutions - and assume the local population will adapt like compliant users to a new operating system. Cole’s framing implicitly indicts the technocratic faith of the early 2000s, where “nation-building” was sold less as politics than as project management.
Then he twists the knife: “guinea pigs.” It’s a moral charge, not just an analytic one. The metaphor suggests experiments conducted at a safe distance, with consequences borne by the subjects rather than the experimenters. Contextually, it echoes the post-invasion arc of Iraq: disbanding the army, de-Baathification, the underestimation of sectarian and nationalist dynamics, and the ensuing spiral into insurgency and civil conflict. Cole’s intent is to reframe the catastrophe as arrogance masquerading as strategy - and to make that arrogance sound as ethically grotesque as it was geopolitically costly.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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