Politics & Power Quote by Brent Scowcroft

Scowcroft is doing the rare Washington thing: warning against a triumphalist storyline while it’s still being written. In two sentences, he punctures the tidy fantasy that removing a dictator automatically unchains democracy, as if ballots were a software update you install after a regime change.

The specific intent is caution, not moral relativism. “Not necessarily” is doing heavy work here: it resists the post-9/11 appetite for certainty and the idea that American power can compress political development into a quick election cycle. Scowcroft’s emphasis on “democratic traditions” signals a realist’s view of institutions: courts that people trust, civilian control of the military, political parties that can lose without reaching for guns, a bureaucracy that functions without being a patronage machine. Elections are a mechanism; they’re not legitimacy by themselves.

The subtext is sharper: ousting Saddam might satisfy a just-war impulse, but the aftermath could produce a vacuum where sectarian identity becomes the only available politics. When he says “Democracy doesn’t just consist of holding elections,” he’s also indicting a familiar American habit of confusing procedure with culture and declaring victory at the first ink-stained finger.

Context matters. As a national security elder who’d seen interventions metastasize, Scowcroft is speaking from the sober memory of what happens when the map is easier to redraw than the social contract. The line reads like an early annotation to the Iraq War debate: if you treat democracy as an event, you’ll be blindsided when it behaves like a long, contested process.