Politics & Power Quote by Arundhati Roy

America’s battlefield dominance is framed here less as a triumph than as a trap: when a superpower perfects conventional war, it pushes everyone else into the shadows. Roy’s sentence starts with the blunt authority of “The fact is,” a move that mimics policy talk and then flips it into moral indictment. The subtext is that U.S. military supremacy doesn’t end conflict; it changes its grammar. If you can’t meet tanks with tanks, you meet them with improvisation, sabotage, propaganda, civilian cover, patience. “Wits and your cunning” sounds almost folkloric, but it’s a cold description of asymmetry: brains replacing hardware because hardware is futile.

The provocation is in the second clause: “the way the Iraqis are fighting.” In the early-2000s context - invasion, occupation, insurgency - that phrase forces an uncomfortable recognition. Roy isn’t offering a clean endorsement of every tactic; she’s insisting on cause and effect. When one side has overwhelming, technologically insulated force, the other side’s options narrow to methods the dominant power can then label illegitimate. The line exposes how “terror” and “insurgency” can be less innate identities than roles produced by an uneven contest.

Rhetorically, Roy uses “impossible” and “all you have” to shut down fantasies of conventional resistance and redirect attention to the political economy of war: procurement, airpower, surveillance, and distance. The sting is that American invulnerability becomes a generator of the very kinds of warfare it claims to be eradicating.