Politics & Power Quote by Peter Arnett

Arnett’s line lands like a quiet indictment, delivered in the measured cadence of a reporter who’s watched official narratives melt on contact with reality. The blunt opening - “The first war plan has failed” - rejects the euphemisms that usually cushion military setbacks. No “setbacks,” no “unexpected challenges,” just failure, pinned to a cause Washington preferred to minimize: “Iraqi resistance.” The intent isn’t to romanticize Saddam-era forces; it’s to puncture the coalition’s script of inevitability.

The subtext is about arrogance as strategy. “Now they are trying to write another war plan” frames the U.S. machine as reactive, improvising in public while selling confidence at home. Arnett’s “Clearly” is doing rhetorical work: it’s the journalist’s version of holding up evidence and daring the audience to deny it. He’s not claiming secret access so much as pointing to an observable contradiction between planning and outcomes.

Context matters: early in the Iraq War, U.S. messaging leaned hard on technological superiority, rapid collapse, “shock and awe,” and a short runway to victory. Arnett is describing the moment when that promise starts to fray - not because America lacked firepower, but because it misunderstood what it was fighting. “Determination” is the key word: it shifts the frame from hardware to will, from battlefield metrics to political psychology. That’s a critique military planners hate because it implies the problem isn’t a tweakable tactic; it’s the premise. Coming from a journalist, it also doubles as a warning about information control: if the plan failed, what else in the story was engineered to sound inevitable?