Daily Inspiration Quote by Brent Scowcroft

A clipped sentence, but it carries the full architecture of a post-invasion argument: Iraq cannot stabilize because a key constituency refuses to accept that the state no longer mirrors its old hierarchy. Scowcroft frames the problem less as sectarian hatred than as ownership psychology. The phrase "belongs to them" is doing the heavy lifting, recasting Sunni political anxiety as entitlement, not fear. That choice is tactical. It shifts moral weight away from the chaos of regime change and onto the supposed inability of Sunnis to adapt.

"Still stuck in the Saddam era mindset" is a Cold War veteran's way of diagnosing history as a kind of cognitive disorder. It implies the past is not a material reality - ministries purged, officers dismissed, livelihoods erased - but a mental habit to be corrected. The subtext is a policy critique aimed at both Iraqi actors and, indirectly, American expectations: you cannot build "a new country" if one group is invested in vetoing the project itself. The line also flatters the nation-building premise by treating the "new country" as a coherent destination rather than an imposed experiment contested from the start.

Context matters. Scowcroft was a realist, skeptical of the 2003 invasion and the fantasy that toppling a dictator automatically yields pluralism. Yet the realism here has an edge: it reduces Sunni resistance to nostalgia for dominance, a framing that can legitimize hardline counterinsurgency and marginalize legitimate grievances under the banner of progress. It's an argument that sounds like diagnosis, but functions like attribution of blame - and in Iraq, blame was never politically neutral.