Pottery Store Rule

A phrase denoting the responsibility of America (and Britain) to rebuild Iraq following their invasion.

Discussing the imminent withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, the BBC’s Mark Urban argued that:

protest had a righteous place in trying to prevent what many considered an unjust and illegal war. But once British troops were engaged, the success of their mission should have become an issue of broad national consensus. ….

Anti-war Brits, or the reasonable ones at least, should have rallied around the so-called “pottery shop” argument – we owned Iraq because we (helped) break it. I heard American soldiers use this justification for the surge as they were risking their lives during the peak of the violence, and to me it has undeniable force.

The pottery store analogy seems to have been coined by The Times’s Thomas Friedman who, in February 2003, cautioned:

The first rule of any Iraq invasion is the pottery store rule: You break it, you own it. We break Iraq, we own Iraq – and we own the primary responsibility for rebuilding a country of 23 million people that has more in common with Yugoslavia than with any other Arab nation.

According to Friedman, “Colin Powell later picked up on [the pottery store rule] and used the phrase to try to get President Bush to act with more caution.”