Politics & Power Quote by Ike Skelton

Skelton’s sentence reads like a briefing-room sorting exercise: name the actors, define the objective, move on. That bureaucratic plainness is the point. In 2000s Washington, the Iraq conflict was routinely narrated through categories that could fit on a PowerPoint slide - “Baathists,” “Sunnis,” “insurgents” - as if pinning labels to people could also pin down a war. The line tries to impose order on chaos by turning a shifting set of militias, networks, ex-regime holdouts, and local power brokers into a coherent, knowable bloc with a single aim.

The specific intent is political clarity: to identify the opposition as ideologically tainted (Baathist) and sectarian (Sunni) while framing their purpose as illegitimate by definition: “toppling the government that is there.” That phrasing quietly smuggles in a claim of rightful authority. The government “that is there” is treated as settled fact, not a contested project built under occupation, with institutions still finding their footing and legitimacy unevenly distributed across communities.

Subtextually, Skelton is also doing coalition maintenance back home. By presenting the conflict as a fight against identifiable spoilers rather than a broad-based civil conflict or nationalist resistance, the war becomes more narratable, more winnable, and less morally ambiguous. Yet the sentence’s neatness exposes its vulnerability: it flattens motives into a single “goal,” when Iraq’s violence was fueled by overlapping grievances - security vacuums, de-Baathification, sectarian fear, foreign fighters, and local revenge. The language signals the era’s governing impulse: if you can classify the problem, you can manage it. Iraq refused to cooperate.