War & Peace Quote by Janis Karpinski

The knife twist in Karpinski's line is the breezy “of course.” It reads like routine bureaucratic arithmetic, the kind of logistical aside you’d expect in a staffing memo. That’s the point: she frames a moral catastrophe as an administrative inevitability. If the war is “declared over,” then the machinery of occupation can downshift, personnel can be cut, and the prison can be “reduced” like inventory. The language doesn’t deny what happened; it sidesteps it by speaking in the calm dialect of procedure.

Karpinski’s context matters. As the officer associated with Abu Ghraib’s command structure, she’s operating in a post-scandal landscape where accountability became a fight over org charts, unclear authorities, and who owned “release procedures.” Her intent is defensive but not overtly emotional. She’s trying to show cause-and-effect: Washington’s narrative of victory in May 2003 created a pressure to normalize, to shrink the footprint, to reassign MPs. The subtext is that the conditions for abuse weren’t just “bad apples,” but a thinning system: fewer guards, less oversight, more chaos, and a prison environment still flooded by a war that was supposedly “over.”

The most chilling irony is the temporal split: “major combat operations” end, yet detention continues, and the institutional attention fades precisely when the moral stakes get sharper. Declaring something finished doesn’t make it finished; it just changes who’s watching.