Rosa Brooks > Quotes

“It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118)”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The old adage applies here as well. If your only functioning government institution is the military, everything looks like a war—and when everything looks like war, everything looks like a military mission.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“Most fundamentally, the U.S. military is—and will continue to be—a product of our culture and our collective decisions. Whatever it is, it's what we have made it.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“Don’t imagine that our world can’t collapse: there is nothing inevitable about progress or peace, and the global and national social and political order we inhabit today is no more immune from catastrophe than the pre–World War II order.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“My point here is not that the Iraq War was a bad idea in the first place (though it certainly was). My point is that this cynical, foolish, arguably illegal war might still have come right in the end—if only we had tried a little less hard to fix everything that struck us as broken.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.

US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“If I grew up with the distinct sense that our mother admired the masculine and viewed the feminine as contemptible, my brother tells me he grew up with an equally strong conviction that she viewed masculinity as toxic and dangerous. Both of us are probably right.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“total spent on Defense-related activities is close to $1 trillion a year.19 Even in this era of fiscal austerity, proposing significant cuts to military compensation and benefits is still considered political suicide for national politicians.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“High Visibility Patrol. Other item of note: Units observed a female having a panic attack in the middle of Bladensburg Road NE due to a spider on the inside of her windshield. Officers removed a spider from woman’s car in traffic and she was very relieved. —MPD Reserve Corps Newsletter”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital

“Many at the State Department think its their job, not the Army's, to develop cultural and regional expertise and relationships. In such quarters, the RAF concept looks less like an innovative approach to global risk management than yet another military effort to replace diplomats with soldiers.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“policing is not a malevolent conspiracy; most police officers take seriously their role as public servants. The widely publicized incidents of police violence and abuse often lead us to forget that the vast majority of police officers spend the vast majority of their time helping people who ask for their help. Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don’t get to choose whether to respond.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“As “war rules” trickle down into ordinary life, they are beginning to change everything from policing and immigration policy to courtroom evidentiary rules and governmental commitments to transparency, gradually eroding the foundations of democracy and individual rights. In”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“When you have more crimes, you need more cops—and when you have more cops, you find more ways to use them. (In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. It’s the equivalent of routinely sending armed police to enforce IRS regulations or municipal building code regulations. It makes little sense, and increases the number of police-citizen encounters with the potential to go badly wrong.)”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“Bluntly: the United States will need to accept some further loss of sovereignty in exchange for more just and effective mechanisms for solving collective global problems. No state can combat disease, climate change, or international terrorist organizations on its own--but any state can play a destructive and destabilizing role on its own.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“Building relationships on a global scale requires putting human beings on the ground in regions all over the world—and only the Army has the manpower to do this.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it’s very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it’s almost impossible to be good at them all.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“...In 2008, when the United States recognized Kosovo´s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, [Vladimir] Putin was furious; the UN had promised to respect Serbia´s sovereign integrity. Putin argued that the US decision oi disregard what Russia saw as Serbia´s threatened to ¨blow apart the whole system of international relations."The United States and other states opting to recognize Kosovar independence, should understand that their decision was ¨a two-sided stick,¨ warned Putin, ¨and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.¨

That particular two-sided stick has already been deployed by the Russians in the context of Ukraine and Crimea, where Putin greeted US protestations about the importance of respecting Ukrainian sovereignty with little more than a cynical smirk. In Syria too, Putin has highlighted inconsistencies in US actions and legal arguments: if the United States can use military force inside Syria without the consent of the Syrian government, why should Russia be condemned for using force inside Ukraine?

The legal precedents we are setting risk undermining the fragile norms of sovereignty and human rights that help keep our world stable. We should ask ourselves this: Do we want to live in a world in which every state considers itself to have a legal right to kill people in other states, secretly and with no public disclosure or due process, based on its own unilateral assertions of national security prerogatives?”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“For the most part, America’s criminal justice system isn’t deliberately cruel. It’s just indifferent to the ways in which it breaks human beings. Few police officers want to contribute to mass incarceration or aid in the destruction of poor minority communities. But the absurdities and injustices are inherent in the system. Often, by the time the police get involved, the only available choices are bad ones.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“When war transcends all boundaries, do the legal and moral categories we have relied upon to channel and constrain violence and coercion lose all value? Do we lose the checks and balances essential to preserving individual liberty and the rule of law? Or”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“Over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand—police go where people ask them to go. To put it a little differently: Police don’t operate in a vacuum. They are paid by taxpayer dollars; they respond to the directives and incentives created by national, state, and municipal laws, policies, and political pressures; and in a day-to-day sense, they respond to whatever calls happen to come in over the 911 lines, whether those calls involve complaints about armed robberies or about disorderly conduct.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops.
If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“We’re trapped in a vicious circle: asking the military to take on more and more nontraditional tasks requires exhausting our all-volunteer military force and necessitates higher military budgets. Higher”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“painful ambiguities.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all—and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared.”
― Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon

“inside”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital

“Violence is a puzzle. We all say we oppose violence and want to reduce it, but no human society gets by without it.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City