Justice & Law Quote by Janis Karpinski

Bureaucratic passivity is doing a lot of work here. Karpinski’s phrasing turns a seismic institutional failure into a chain of bland handoffs: a “policy” gets “abandoned,” responsibility gets “tagged,” training gets done, and the sentence keeps moving as if no one in particular touched the wheel. It’s the syntax of plausible deniability, the kind that thrives in wartime systems where accountability is designed to diffuse across units, acronyms, and rotating commanders.

The specific intent reads like an alibi aimed upward and outward. By stressing that the military police inherited training duties and that “we were not equipped,” she’s locating the origin of failure in structure rather than character: understaffing, misassignment, mission creep. That’s not just self-protection; it’s an argument about how disasters happen when an organization improvises under pressure and then pretends improvisation is a plan. The subtext is sharper: if abuses or breakdowns followed, they weren’t the product of “bad apples” so much as a system that assigned an ill-suited force to build a security apparatus on the fly.

Context matters because the U.S. occupation of Iraq leaned heavily on rapidly assembled local forces and outsourced security, with inconsistent vetting and training. When Karpinski says they couldn’t “recruit new Iraqi guards,” she’s pointing to a vacuum at the center of the project: you can’t stand up legitimacy with a skeleton crew and a borrowed mandate. The quote works because it sounds like routine administrative testimony, and that ordinariness is the indictment.