If Bush hadn't ousted Saddam, he'd be blamed now for not ousting Saddam

Nobody can know what would have happened in Iraq if President George W. Bush had not invaded and Saddam was still in power to face the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring was, as its name suggests, an exclusively Sunni Arab affair, whatever its pretensions to universalism. But Sunni or not, it spread its magic by way not only of social media and electronic communications, but by way of the Arabic language. For example, demonstrators in Yemen were inspired by demonstrators in Tunisia. And because Iraq’s Shiites are also Arabic speaking, it is likely that they, too, would have been inspired to revolt against a totalitarian and Sunni system that Bush, in this scenario, would have left in place.

A Shiite revolt against Saddam would have had one of two results: either Saddam would have crushed it with his trademark level of brutality that would have left tens of thousands dead; or, the revolt would have succeeded, with a sectarian war and the break-up of Iraq as a consequence. That, too, would have led to a scale of bloodshed comparable with the Syrian conflict. The idea that a soft landing was possible in Iraq following Saddam is probably naive. Fiercely secularizing Baathist regimes that use utter brutality to contain explosive ethnic and sectarian rivalries do not result in a soft landing.

Here is a paradox to consider: if George W. Bush had not invaded Iraq and the country violently blew apart in the course of the Arab Spring, Bush would have been blamed for not ridding Iraq of Saddam when he had had the chance. As someone who supported the Iraq War, this is a convenient paradox for me to entertain, even if I have to live with the facts as they exist, which declare the Iraq War a mistake.