War & Peace Quote by Brent Scowcroft

A realist’s rebuke, delivered in the calm, clipped language of someone who measures disasters in second- and third-order effects. Brent Scowcroft isn’t arguing that Saddam Hussein was benign; he’s arguing that obsession is expensive. The intent is triage: set priorities in a world where attention, legitimacy, and military capacity are finite. “Should not have been our highest priority” is a deliberately modest phrasing that carries a sharper implication: making Iraq the centerpiece of U.S. strategy would distort everything else Washington claimed to care about.

The subtext is about sequencing and credibility. “Fighting terrorism” signals the post-9/11 threat environment and the need to stay focused on transnational networks rather than a contained, brutal state. Sliding quickly to “the Palestinian peace process” is the tell: Scowcroft is pointing to the political ecosystem in which counterterrorism actually operates. Ignore Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy and you don’t just lose a negotiating track; you hand extremists a recruiting narrative and complicate cooperation with Arab partners whose publics see U.S. policy as one-sided. He’s also reminding the reader that alliances are not abstractions. They are governments with constraints, and those constraints become leverage against you when your priorities look opportunistic.

Context matters: Scowcroft, a Bush 41 national security elder, helped shape the first Gulf War’s limited aims and the decision not to march to Baghdad. His critique reads as continuity, not contrarianism: power should be used surgically, not as therapy for American impatience.