Here is where I will make the obligatory acknowledgment that the coalition’s post-war planning — or lack thereof — was totally inadequate, that its hasty disbanding of the Iraqi military opened up a power vacuum, and that de-Baathification alienated a disenfranchised Sunni population. All of these preventable mistakes exacerbated pre-existing sectarian tensions. But nobody forced Iraqis to murder each other in their hundreds of thousands owing to disagreements over Mohammad’s progeny, the source of the Sunni–Shia divide responsible for so much bloodletting across the Arab world today.
The post-conflict fate of another country is instructive. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Catholics and Protestants in that utterly defeated nation — one whose post-war destruction was of an order of magnitude greater than that inflicted upon Iraq in 2003 — did not engage in civil war. If they had, no serious person would have hesitated to blame them for failing to take advantage of what German president Richard von Weizsäcker called, on the 40th anniversary of the war’s end, “a day of liberation.” Like Germans in May 1945, Iraqis in April 2003 were handed what few citizens of hardened dictatorships ever receive: freedom, and the opportunity to build a new country. At the cost of much American blood and treasure, Iraqis were given what the late scholar Fouad Ajami termed “the Foreigner’s gift.” With the glaring exception of the Kurds, they blew it.
If supporters of the Iraq War can be blamed for anything, it is being guilty of, at worst, a naïveté whereby they expected too much from Iraqis — not, as the latter-day inquisitors of George W. Bush and Tony Blair would have it, of a malignant desire to rape and pillage. Iraq’s tragic predicament is the result not of Western imperialism but of the particular pathologies of a Muslim-Arab world whose depredations are now on full view across the region, from Syria to Lebanon to Yemen and beyond.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member