Leadership Quote by John Spratt

Spratt’s sentence reads like a prosecutor’s closing argument dressed up as a bookkeeping memo: three numbered “assumptions,” three failures, no theatrics. That restraint is the point. By framing the Iraq War not as a tragedy or a betrayal but as an error stack, he makes the critique harder to dismiss as ideological. It’s an indictment of planning culture, not just policy.

The first assumption punctures the most moralized sales pitch of the invasion: liberation. Spratt doesn’t argue motives; he tests outcomes. “Welcome us” is doing heavy work here, exposing how occupation was rhetorically repackaged as rescue, and how that story depended on an almost consumerist fantasy of gratitude. The second assumption goes after the alchemy that tried to turn war into a self-financing project. “Oil would soon pay” is the language of a business plan, and that’s exactly what it mocks: the idea that reconstruction could be treated as a revenue cycle rather than a political, human, and security commitment.

The third assumption is the most damning because it’s operational. “Plenty of troops, weapons, and equipment” drags the debate from lofty justification into the unglamorous facts of capacity. The phrase “postwar situation” is a cold euphemism for insurgency, sectarian breakdown, and the long tail of instability Washington publicly minimized.

Context matters: Spratt, a Democratic leader during the mid-2000s reckoning, is speaking from inside the institution that authorized and funded this war. The subtext is accountability without confession: a way to say “we were sold a story” while also warning that wars fail less from lack of ideals than from surplus of convenient assumptions.