Politics & Power Quote by Brent Scowcroft

Scowcroft is doing what he did best: arguing for leverage without chest-thumping, and for legitimacy without pretending it is altruism. The line is engineered to sound modest - “could help,” “get on its feet,” “withdraw a bit more” - but the intent is strategic triage. Iraq, in this framing, isn’t a sovereign project so much as a stabilization problem with a timetable attached.

The subtext is that the United States can’t cleanly exit a war it politically owns. “The UN” functions as a reputational solvent: a way to dilute the occupation’s U.S. fingerprint and rebrand the next phase as “international support,” not American improvisation. Scowcroft is also signaling something Washington rarely says out loud: institutions matter most when they provide cover. UN involvement doesn’t merely add capacity; it adds a story the Iraqi government can tell its public and the region can tolerate.

Context matters: this is the post-2003 predicament of an Iraqi state hollowed out by invasion, de-Baathification, insurgency, and sectarian fracture, while U.S. domestic patience erodes. Scowcroft, a realist with deep Cold War instincts, is effectively proposing burden-shifting with a legitimacy upgrade. “Withdraw a bit more” is the tell. It acknowledges limits - military, moral, political - without conceding failure. The sentence is diplomacy as damage control: find an exit ramp that looks like a handoff rather than a retreat, and use the UN as the hinge.