Daily Inspiration Quote by Jon Lee Anderson

There’s a quiet indictment packed into that conditional: “I don’t think” softens the blow just enough to pass as reportage, while “would have had to” frames occupation not as a choice but as a forced remedy for earlier negligence. Jon Lee Anderson is doing what seasoned war correspondents often do: refusing the comfort of a single villain and insisting on a timeline. The real target isn’t the later invasion; it’s the moral and strategic shortcut taken when history offered a different exit ramp.

The context is the post-Gulf War settlement. In 1991, the U.S. and its allies expelled Iraq from Kuwait, then stopped short of toppling Saddam Hussein. That decision was sold as prudence: avoid Baghdad, avoid chaos, avoid the mess of ownership. Anderson’s line suggests the opposite kind of mess was inevitable once Saddam remained, sanctions calcified, uprisings were encouraged and then abandoned, and Iraqi society was squeezed between dictatorship and deprivation. “The right thing” is deliberately unspecific, which is the point: he’s gesturing at a cluster of foregone responsibilities - protecting rebels, committing to regime change if you hint at it, or crafting a postwar order that didn’t punish civilians while entrenching the regime.

Subtextually, it’s a critique of American half-measures dressed up as restraint. Anderson implies that occupation wasn’t an unforeseeable tragedy but the bill coming due for an earlier decision to manage Iraq at arm’s length. The line also smuggles in a bitter journalist’s realism: in geopolitics, refusing to finish a job is still a choice - it just delays the consequences until they’re larger, bloodier, and easier to misdescribe as “necessity.”