# Pottery Barn Rule "You break it, you own it." The Pottery Barn Rule is the private phrase [[Colin Powell]] and his deputy [[Richard Armitage]] used to capture the open-ended obligation the United States would assume by invading Iraq. It became the most quoted distillation of Powell's reluctance about the [[Iraq War]] — and, in hindsight, one of the most prophetic warnings of the entire episode. ## The Warning to Bush As reported by Bob Woodward in *Plan of Attack*, Powell met privately with [[George W. Bush]] in the summer of 2002 to lay out the consequences of war. "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," Powell told the president. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all." Powell and Armitage called this, between themselves, the Pottery Barn rule. The point was that toppling Saddam Hussein would be the easy part; the occupation, the sectarian fracture, and the reconstruction would become America's permanent property — a prediction borne out by the [[Coalition Provisional Authority]], the insurgency, and the rise of [[Islamic State]]. ## The Misattribution The name is a misnomer. Pottery Barn, the home-furnishings chain, has no such policy — broken merchandise is written off as a store loss, even when a customer breaks it. The phrase nonetheless stuck in the public imagination as shorthand for the moral and practical logic of "the responsibility of the breaker." ## RWKB Significance The Pottery Barn Rule is a hinge between Powell's caution and his complicity: the man who privately warned that the war was unownable went on to deliver the [[Powell UN Presentation]] that helped sell it. It belongs to the vault's [[Forever Wars]] cluster as the clearest contemporaneous statement of the trap — articulated by an insider, ignored by the administration, and vindicated by a decade of occupation. It also reads as a coda to the [[Powell Doctrine]]'s exit-strategy tenet: the war had no exit because, by Powell's own logic, there was nothing to exit to. ## See Also - [[Colin Powell]] - [[Iraq War]] - [[Powell Doctrine]] - [[Forever Wars]] - [[Richard Armitage]]