Politics & Power Quote by Juan Cole

Cole’s sentence is built like a prosecutor’s bill of particulars: arrogant, illegal, ignorant, incompetent. The piling-on isn’t just emphasis; it’s strategy. By moving from a moral charge (arrogance) to a legal one (illegality), then to failures of knowledge and capacity (ignorance, incompetence), he tries to close off the usual escape hatches. You can debate motives, but if the policies are illegal, debate shifts from opinion to accountability. You can argue intentions, but ignorance and incompetence indict the entire apparatus, not merely its goals.

The key phrase is “American administration of Iraq,” which quietly frames the U.S. presence as something closer to colonial governance than a temporary intervention. That framing matters: “administration” implies command-and-control, bureaucracy, and ownership of outcomes. It turns the occupation into a governance project that can be judged by standards of legitimacy, law, and performance.

“I said this very forthrightly to the senators” is its own kind of power move. Cole is not only criticizing policy; he’s narrating his proximity to institutional authority. The subtext is: I didn’t lob this from the sidelines; I carried it into the room where decisions are blessed and budgets approved. In the post-9/11 Iraq debate, that posture challenges a common Washington reflex: treating dissent as naivete or disloyalty. Cole positions expertise - the educator, the area specialist - as a counterweight to the swaggering certainties that sold the war, and he does it by refusing the comforting language of “mistakes.” This is a claim of systemic failure.