Politics & Power Quote by Peter Brimelow

“I think” does a lot of laundering here. Brimelow’s line is framed as mild, technocratic skepticism about strategy, but the restraint is part of the move: it pretends to be a cool cost-benefit memo while smuggling in a much hotter argument about who “America” is for. “Not particularly tailored” borrows the language of bespoke policy - as if wars are suits - and it drains moral vocabulary (civilian death, occupation, torture) out of the picture. The war becomes a misaligned product, not a political choice with blood on its hands.

The key term is “American interests,” a phrase that sounds objective until you ask who gets to define it. Brimelow’s broader project has long been about narrowing the boundaries of national belonging; in that light, the critique of Iraq is less anti-war than anti-commitment: a suspicion of foreign entanglements that don’t visibly cash out for his preferred constituency. That’s the subtext: not “this is wrong,” but “this is not ours.”

Context matters. Post-9/11, mainstream pro-war rhetoric sold Iraq as security, democratization, and credibility. Critics attacked the false premises and the moral catastrophe. Brimelow’s phrasing sidesteps both, positioning him as the hard-nosed realist in a room of sentimentalists and ideologues. It’s a savvy posture for a polemicist: condemn the war without joining the coalition of people who condemned its rationale. The sentence’s power lies in that evasive precision - it lets the speaker sound reasonable while keeping the real argument just offstage.