War & Peace Quote by John Spratt

Power leaks into the vacuum you create, and Spratt is pointing a finger at the makers of that vacuum. The line is structured like an indictment disguised as a field report: “no other security forces on hand” establishes abandonment, “almost alone” turns strategy into isolation, and the paired threats - “insurgency” and “crime rate” - argue that the U.S. wasn’t fighting one war but policing a collapsing state with too few cops and too many enemies.

The intent is policy critique, aimed less at Iraqi actors than at American decision-making after the invasion. Spratt highlights a chain reaction: disband the Iraqi army, you don’t eliminate armed men; you declassify them into unemployed, humiliated professionals with weapons knowledge and local legitimacy. Release criminals from prison, you don’t “reset” society; you spike the market for violence. His phrasing “waged in part… and in part…” is a rhetorical ledger, allocating blame across predictable categories that nonetheless share a common origin: institutional dismantling without replacement.

Subtext: the U.S. military was asked to do an impossible job, and the impossibility wasn’t accidental. The quote quietly challenges the fantasy that toppling a regime is the hard part. It also inoculates against simplistic narratives of “irrational insurgents,” implying that disorder was engineered by decisions that treated security as an afterthought and governance as optional. Coming from a politician, it’s also a domestic argument: accountability isn’t measured by intentions, but by the foreseeable consequences of policy.