War & Peace Quote by Michael Ignatieff

There is a particular chill in the way Ignatieff frames the war as a possession: something "we wanted" and now "we've got", like an overbought luxury item that turns out to be unreturnable. The line doesn’t plead innocence; it indicts appetite. Whoever "we" is - leaders, pundits, voters, the national security class - is implicated in a kind of moral consumerism: the desire for clarity, purpose, and decisive action that war promises, right up until war demands competence, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity.

The second clause is the knife twist. "I'm not sure that we know what to do with it" reads like understatement, but it's a diagnosis of strategic emptiness. War is treated as an event rather than a long, messy process: you initiate it, declare victory, move on. Ignatieff’s subtext is that the pro-war coalition often conflates launching a conflict with controlling its outcomes. Wanting war becomes easier than governing the aftermath.

Context matters because Ignatieff is not just a politician but a public intellectual who moved between academia, media, and power. He’s speaking from inside the institutions that manufacture consent and then scramble when consent meets consequences: insurgency, state collapse, civilian harm, blowback. The quote lands because it exposes the seduction of war as narrative - a clean story of resolve - and the humiliation of war as reality, where intention stops counting the moment the shooting starts.