Leadership Quote by Robin Cook

Cook’s line lands like an indictment disguised as plainspoken bookkeeping: before we arrived, the “international terrorists” column was empty; after, it’s a growth industry. The rhetorical trick is the simple before-and-after contrast, a politician’s version of a lab result. No soaring metaphors, no chest-thumping. Just a causal claim that flips the script on the post-9/11 security narrative: intervention wasn’t merely costly or messy, it was generative. We didn’t fail to stop the threat; we helped manufacture its operating environment.

The subtext is a rebuke of moral outsourcing. By saying “we who gave the perfect conditions,” Cook refuses the comforting idea that terrorism is an external contagion that must be met with force. He points to the ecology of insurgency: power vacuums, humiliation, civilian casualties, sectarian fracture, and the propaganda jackpot of occupation. “Perfect conditions” is cutting because it suggests something closer to cultivation than accident, as if the policy choices weren’t just wrong but perversely well-suited to the enemy’s needs.

Context matters: Cook was a senior UK figure who resigned as Leader of the House of Commons in 2003 over Iraq, making this critique not anti-American reflex but insider dissent. That posture gives the quote its sting. He’s not asking for a softer war; he’s arguing the war itself was a recruitment poster, an accelerant sold as a firebreak. In one sentence, he reframes “security” as a feedback loop: violence justified by threat, then threat enlarged by violence.