How many Americans know that Iraq was a constitutional monarchy for thirty-three years (1925–1958) and an independent democracy for twenty-six years? Or that during that time, democratically elected governments waged an internal war of effective genocide against their own Assyrian communities, repeatedly permitted looting and pogroms against their ancient Jewish communities, and operated secret police forces and torture chambers simultaneously with free and fair elections?

The British rule over Iraq after World War I wasn’t a golden age either. The British imported Indian troops to crush a widespread Shiite-led uprising in 1920; tens of thousands died. They prevented the international community from protecting Assyrians from slaughter in 1932–1933. And the democratic Iraqi government bombed defenseless women and children in the villages of rebellious Arab troops.

Iraq as its own separate country was the brainchild of Winston Churchill when he was Britain’s colonial overlord after World War I. Churchill quickly came to regret his creation, made at the urging of romantic and mentally unbalanced British Arabophiles like T. E. Lawrence. In World War II, the Iraqi army rose with eagerness to stab Britain in the back and join Nazi Germany. It was Jewish Palestine, later Israel, that proved the one loyal force to Britain and the Allies in the Middle East. The reconquest of Iraq was launched with scratch forces boldly striking east across the desert from Jerusalem to Baghdad. All this isn’t secret or suppressed history. It’s just history most people in the West are unaware of.

Guess what?

Iraq was a democracy for twenty-six years. And it didn’t work.

The Shiites of Iraq twice have led a ferocious nationalist uprising against an English-speaking superpower that wanted to bring Western-style democracy to their country.

The Israelis helped block a Nazi takeover of Iraq before there was even an Israel.

Just like today: A bad beginning

An invincible English-speaking nation liberates the ancient territories of Mesopotamia from a notoriously vicious and brutal dictatorship. Its soldiers are first welcomed as liberators and the administrators of the occupying power confidently set up new, enlightened systems of Western constitutional and democratic government. But their plans are derailed by a ferocious popular revolt that kills thousands of the liberating power’s soldiers, and tens of thousands of native inhabitants die too as the violence rages.

Iraq after 2003? Of course. But it was also Iraq under the British in 1920. In 1920, however, the revolt against the occupying power did not come primarily from Sunni Muslims in the center of the country but from Shiite Muslims in the south.

Troops of the British-controlled Indian Army savagely crushed the uprising. The cost was high. William L. Cleveland, a serious and balanced American authority, puts the death toll at 460 British soldiers and 10,000 Iraqis, mostly Shiites. Later Iraqi estimates put the death toll much higher.

British policy was to act ruthlessly and on a widespread scale after such serious revolts, and the Shiites were certainly cowed. In fact, the Shiites of southern Iraq remained the most cautious and politically quiescent of all the communities in Iraq until Saddam Hussein was toppled and the activist influence of the Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran finally started to take hold among them.

PC Myth: Democracy Will Bring Peace

A mericans like to think all people are the same regardless of their history, their political views, and where they live. The American experience of absorbing waves of immigrants from every corner of the word has led them to think like that. Politically correct politicians and journalists will accuse you of bigotry if you suggest that some people are not quite wired for liberal democracy the way Americans are.

But it took the American people 220 years of development and a revolutionary war just to reach the point of universal white male adult suffrage in the 1820s. And not even forty years after that, American democracy split in two and fought the most bloody civil war the Western world had ever seen. It is quite a stretch to assume that nations lacking the advantage of hundreds of years’ (mostly) peaceful legal and constitutional development can easily make the same leap that took us so long. Some stripes of multiculturalists—or, alternatively, some stripes of neoconservatives—like to dismiss the importance of our intellectual and religious heritage. Our philosophy of governance comes from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and England. Our morality and culture come from Judaism and Christianity. It is a relativist folly to claim that these heritages don’t matter.

Democracy, as Winston Churchill famously said, is the worst form of government imaginable, except for all the other ones that have been tried. In other words, it isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot preferable to the alternatives. But you can’t impose it on other countries from the outside. Democracy needs a certain foundation. That foundation does not exist in the deserts of Mesopotamia.

The problem is not that Iraq and its Middle East neighbors are ungovernable—it’s that U.S. policymakers never bothered to study the only stable and successful form of government the Middle East ever knew: the Ottoman Empire.

Bush administration policymakers made one stupid, idealistic liberal mistake after another in Iraq: they never put enough troops in the country to maintain basic law and order, they disbanded the one force that could peacefully hold Iraq together—its army—and they put their trust in an exiled charlatan politician and convicted criminal about whom their own diplomats and intelligent service had correctly warned them.

When Ahmed Chalabi proved a bust, U.S. policymakers created a ridiculous constitution that couldn’t possibly work and that had no connection with the real political experience of ordinary Iraqis. They assumed that free elections would produce a moderate, reasonable parliament that would act quickly to set up a powerful government. They assumed the already powerful and uncompromising militias wouldn’t control the main political factions in the parliament. They assumed that political groups with no experience of political give-and-take for forty-five years would suddenly sober up and practice it. No real conservative would have fallen for these delusions for a second.

The Shiite Revolt had lasting consequences on the way the British shaped Iraq. Although the Shiites were already by far the majority population in the country, the British kept them out in the political cold for the next thirty-eight years, up to 1958. The political elite in the corrupt and creaky but recognizably democratic political system in Baghdad were all Sunni Muslims, mainly from the center and north of the country. More important, so were the dominant officer corps of the new Iraqi army

The British also encouraged the new Sunni Muslim elite they favored to think in pan-Arab terms. Iraq eventually joined the new Arab League. The British thought they could establish themselves as the friends of the Arabs and so undermine their traditional rivals, the French, in the region. They never grasped that Arabs throughout the Middle East hated the Brits more than they did the French—the British had taken control of far more territory and far larger populations. In 1958, it was the Sunni officer corps, nurtured and protected by the British for so long, who finally kicked them out of Iraq. Sunni Muslim control of the nation and its oil wealth lasted another forty-five years until the U.S. Army swept through the country and a new generation of ignorant Western policymakers decided they knew how to remake the country in their own image.

Democracy in Iraq: 1925–1958

Completely absent from the supposedly competent, learned, and sophisticated U.S. media in the fateful months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was any reference, let alone serious discussion, of what had happened when Iraq last tried democracy. Democracy wasn’t a political antibiotic guaranteed to cure Iraqis of all their woes. They had enjoyed what were supposed to be the blessings of a constitutional democracy, freedom of speech, an independent judiciary, a free press, free democratic elections, and an elected parliament for more than a quarter of a century—and the results hadn’t been pretty.

What happened in the 1930s when Britain proclaimed Iraq independent under its own rulers (with British troops and guidance remaining, of course)? Exactly the same thing that happened after the December 2005 Iraqi elections that elected the wonderful Iraqi parliament and parties we see today: terrible cross-community massacres and civil war, with the official army enthusiastically participating.

In 1933, right after Britain granted Iraq titular independence, the Iraqi army under Kurdish general Bakr Sidqi launched a massive pogrom against the Christian Assyrian community in northern Iraq, slaughtering many thousands of them. So frightful were the killings that there was a serious move in the League of Nations to try to rescind full Iraqi independence, but it was blocked by Iraq’s British protectors.

The political and military history of Iraqi “democracy” under British “guidance” is mind-numbing: it is a bewildering series of intrigues, coups, treacheries, revolts, and the crushing of one tribe after another with brutal military force.

On October 29, 1936, the first military coup in the Arab world took place in Iraq when General Sidqi overthrew the government of the day. In June 1941, British forces in Iraq who had just foiled another coup planning to ally Iraq with the Nazi-Axis side stood back passively while frustrated young Iraqi army officers led their forces to kill hundreds of Iraqi Jews and despoil their community.

Repeated Arab tribal rebellions were crushed by the British-supported regimes during this period with the utmost severity. The British, it should be remembered, ruled Iraq directly for fourteen years, from their military conquest in 1918 to 1932. And they remained the real power in the country behind a succession of puppet governments for the next twenty-six years until 1958.

But in all that time, there was also a secret police. There were torture chambers. There was the crushing and despoiling of minorities. And there were the unpredictable terrors of the Baghdad mob. It took this level of brutality to maintain in Iraq the government the British favored.

A Jewish base for the Allies

In 1941, the Iraqi army, which the British had raised themselves, revolted against the British and kicked them out at the height of World War II. The only loyal ally they could find anywhere in the Middle East was the Jewish community in Palestine, or the Yishuv.

General Erwin Rommel was running rings around the British in the Libyan desert at the time and was threatening Egypt. This left the British, already stretched thin, with almost no forces left to reclaim Iraq. The Arab Legion, which had been lovingly grown for two decades to serve as the main reliable Arab army loyal to the British and to enforce their will throughout the Middle East, semi-rebelled and announced they would not march against their own brethren.

At that moment, Churchill’s hinge of fate was swinging wide. If Adolf Hitler had not been so stupid as to send his elite paratroops and other airborne units to be decimated during their conquest of Crete, he could simply have flown enough of them into Iraq to wipe the floor with whatever belated forces the British could scrape together. At that moment, before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe easily had the capability to do the job.

But what crucially turned the tide in the British favor was not the Arab Legion of Transjordan and the Sunni-led Iraqi army in which they had lavished so much investment and pride. It was half a million troublemakers they had grown heartily sick of: the Jewish community of Palestine. The British were able to muster a hastily assembled force of their own reserve troops, Arab Legion forces, and Jewish Palestinian volunteers. Because its strategic target was the vital Habbaniyah air base outside Baghdad, it was called Habforce.

Political Scientists and Idealistic Dreamers Gone Wild

“Iraq needs to be liberated—liberated from big plans. Every time people mentioned it in the last few years, it was to connect it to big ideas: the war against WMD, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict, more recently the war against terrorism and a model of democracy. That’s why all these mistakes are made. They’re made because Iraq is always in someone’s mind the first step to something else.”

Ghassan Salamé, political advisor to assassinated United Nations special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, quoted in The Assassins’ Gate by George Packer

How Iraq’s Last Democracy Ended

“The regent’s sex was first cut off, and then his arms and legs; they were thrown to groups of young men, who ran off waving these members with joyful shouts. By the time the procession reached the ministry of defense on the other side of the river, the body was no more than a bruised and mutilated trunk. . . . What was left of the regent’s body that evening was soaked with petrol and set on fire, the brunt remains being thrown into the Tigris.”

Elie Kedourie, Arabic Political Memoirs

Their column of only six thousand men struck out across the desert from Palestine against apparently impossible odds. The hastily organized light armor/ mobile infantry force was enormously outnumbered by the Iraqi army, now openly Britain’s enemy and Hitler’s ally. In brief but heavy fighting, Habforce turned the tide. The British reestablished themselves over Iraq. But it had been a close-run thing. It was the nearest the Nazis ever got to seizing control of the oil wealth of the Middle East

After the Brits put down the 1941 rebellion, the peace didn’t last much longer. Even the British Empire could not forever keep the Hashemites on the fictional throne in Baghdad. On July 14, 1958, a military coup toppled the monarchy. Twenty-four-year-old King Faisal II, along with his grandmother, aunt, and uncle, were slaughtered in exceptionally grisly circumstances. First they were machine-gunned by one of the officers carrying out the coup, who later said he was in a “state of madness” when he fired the fatal shots. Then the body of the young king was beheaded. The body of the regent, Crown Prince Abdullah, was then mutilated by a Baghdad mob.

The brutal massacre—on par with the Bolsheviks’ slaughter of the czar’s family—ended a twenty-six-year era of constitutional democracy in an independent Iraq.

Yet in the months immediately before and after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the restoration of a Hashemite monarchy to Iraq was actually seriously propounded in American intellectual journals and was favored by some of the most influential and powerful policymakers in the U.S. government.

No one shed any tears for the Iraqi Hashemites once they were dead and gone. Colonel Abd al-Karim Qasim, who led the military coup that toppled Faisal II, was a widely popular, even beloved figure who was fondly remembered long after he was deposed in a another coup and then executed himself.

Where America went wrong

The fevered Left can cry as loud and as long as it wishes, but no sensible person will believe that the Bush administration invaded Iraq to enrich the oil companies or to distract Americans from other administration shortcomings. U.S. policymakers were entirely sincere in their belief that they could and would bring stable, pro-Western democracy to Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in March 2003.

But the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. The road to Baghdad was overlaid with a naïve and overly charitable view of the influential groups in Iraq. The Bush administration’s plan to quickly establish democracy in Iraq stumbled badly because they vastly underestimated the intransigent, unsophisticated, and anti-Western nature of the competing communities.

In 2003 the United States put only a quarter to one-fifth of the land forces into Iraq that were needed to preserve law and order and prevent an immediate collapse into anarchy. Disbanding Saddam’s feared army structure was another mistake resulting from misplaced humanitarianism. There was no other force to fill the gap on short notice, and many of Saddam’s former officers became the heart of the new Sunni insurgency that rapidly developed. Washington policymakers obsessed about crafting an “ideal” and “balanced” constitution for Iraq and a ponderous machinery of popular elections and parliamentary procedures while they ignored the basic issues of producing enough food, fuel, gasoline, and other economic necessities and guaranteeing a sufficient climate of law and order. They thought the 60 percent Shiite community could rapidly be co-opted either by charlatans like Ahmed Chalabi, who never commanded any significant popular following, or religious leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who played Washington from the start. They never dreamed that Iraq’s Shiites, spearheaded by rapidly organizing new militias, could develop an agenda of their own—one contrary to U.S. interests.

Why Western governance doesn’t work there

The answer to this question—which seems to have escaped such prominent writers as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer—was that Iraq isn’t the United States, or anything like it. Democracy could work in Germany and Italy after World War II because, for three quarters of a century from the 1860s onward, there had been a free press, free parliaments (even if their powers were somewhat limited), and free elections in those countries before the Fascist takeovers of the 1920s and 1930s. To a lesser but still significant degree, the same was true in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1869 all the way to the military assassinations and effective takeover of the 1930s.

But as we have seen, during the forty years of British presence from 1918 (and the twenty-six years of constitutional democracy from 1932 to 1958) the reality in Iraq was tribal rivalries, military coups, secret police, and torture chambers. And in the thirty-five years of the Second Ba’ath Republic from 1968 to 2003, Iraq was a totalitarian state of the most extreme sort. Before the British occupation in 1918, there had never been the slightest semblance of modern political culture in Iraq—in striking contrast, for example, to Egypt.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

The Chatham House Version and other Middle Eastern Studies by Elie Kedourie;

Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.

The Iraqi conception of politics was the same merciless, winner-take-all, kill-or-be-killed, zero-sum game that Lenin summed up as “Who/Whom.” You were either “Who”—the subject of the verb, the aggressor, the victimizer—or else you had no choice but “Whom”—the object of the verb, the passive victim helpless to defend himself from whatever the ruler did to him. The contemporary urban equivalent of Lenin’s idea—and Iraq’s politics—would be “get or get got.”

This wasn’t an American conception of politics. It certainly wasn’t a liberal one. But it was the way things had always worked in Iraq.

After Saddam: “Better Tiberius”

A wise old historian once said, “Better Tiberius than a committee.” Tiberius was one of the worst tyrants in the history of the Roman Empire, and Saddam Hussein made him look like Mother Teresa. But rule in Baghdad by the “committee” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld installed turned out to be far worse.

Saddam had been the greatest killer in modern Arab history. He had unleashed two major wars of aggression, attacking Iran and swallowing Kuwait. He had inflicted monstrous atrocities on his own people. The only thing he wasn’t guilty of was the crime that precipitated the 2003 U.S. invasion that finally took him down—funding or other involvement in the planning of the September 11 attacks. But Iraq and the Middle East were vastly more dangerous places after he fell than they were during his last twelve years of power.

The original assessment by President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State James A. Baker, national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, and General Colin Powell—one of the best national security teams in modern U.S. history—to leave Saddam in power in Baghdad was sound. This became very clear after U.S. military forces finally moved into Baghdad for an extended stay in April 2003.

Saddam in power had been an effective block on the Iranians. President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, and their national security teams had recognized this clearly. They saw that Iran was incomparably the greater long-term threat to the United States—and to Israel for that matter—after Iraq’s potentially catastrophic nuclear potential had been destroyed in the 1981 Israeli air force raid. That was why the Bush team backed Iraq to the hilt in its 1980–1988 war against Iran.

PC Myth: Democracy Guarantees Human Rights

The Hashemite monarchy and its parliament didn’t produce the moderate, civilizing, and restrained influence constitutional monarchies are supposed to encourage. Iraq’s Jews, Kurds, Shiites, and many Sunni Muslim tribes all paid the price for “democracy” in a nation that had had no history of constitutional evolution or law. The sweeping confiscation of almost all the property of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community (more than 100,000 strong) was actually carried out according to parliamentary and constitutional propriety on a single day in March 1951.

Far from bringing peace, democracy in Iraq guaranteed war. The competing groups in Iraq from 1932 to 1958 saw the democratic process only as a battle through which to seize the institutions of power and then wield them ruthlessly against everyone else. In nearly half a century since the July 14, 1958, coup, nothing has changed.

Saddam was the only thing stopping Iran from steadily spreading its influence into Iraq, with its 60 percent Shiite majority population. As long as the Iraq state remained stable and dominated by its Sunni minority, the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries were blocked. So fearsome was Saddam’s justly deserved reputation after they were crushed in their 1991 revolt that the Shiite majority of the south would not dare defy him. When old Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr was murdered almost certainly on Saddam’s orders in 1999, there was not a whisper out of the Iraqi Shiite majority. They knew what would happen to them.

But once Saddam was gone, it was a very different story. Donald Rumsfeld froze the State Department, the CIA, and every other part of the U.S. government out of running Iraq. But then he and his top staff didn’t bother to do the job themselves.

A large body of young democracy-touting ideologues, none of whom spoke Arabic or had ever lived in, let alone studied, the history of the Arab world, were flown out to the Green Zone: the comfortable, Star-bucks-equipped enclave in Baghdad from which U.S. forces ruled. As the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), they intended to create a new constitution for Iraq and decide how the country should be ruled. They made the bungling British Empire look competent.

Banking on a bank swindler

Rumsfeld’s policymakers bet heavily on a wealthy Shiite Iraqi adventurer and exile who had been convicted years before of massive bank fraud in Jordan. He escaped a long jail sentence only by fleeing the country.

There was not the slightest reason to believe that Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) were a force in Iraq. The State Department and serious CIA analysts were extremely skeptical of him all along. But their accurate assessments and warnings were ignored by their gung-ho political masters. Yet the assumption that Chalabi was beloved by the Iraqi people, including large numbers in the Sunni-dominated Iraqi army, shored up U.S. war planning from the first. Rumsfeld even wanted to pare the invading U.S. force down from 150,000–180,000 troops to a mere 50,000–60,000 because he was so convinced the Iraqi army wouldn’t fight and large elements of it would defect to U.S. forces as soon as they crossed the border.

Of course, that didn’t happen. But the delusion that Chalabi and his INC would rapidly become the credible, eagerly pro-American government in Iraq died hard. Eventually the CIA gathered compelling evidence that Chalabi may have been an agent for the Iranians all along, and, at the very least, was a serious security risk. They were convinced that he had leaked confidential codes and information he should never have had to the Iranians. Rumsfeld’s lieutenants then cut off their links to him—at least for a time.

That’s the Way It Is

“Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason, and rapine and however pitiful its end, we may now say this was implicit in its beginning.”

Elie Kedourie, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect,” in The Chatham House Version and Other Studies

Even without Chalabi, the naïve U.S. planners in the Green Zone and their political masters back home weren’t too perturbed. They had invaded and occupied Iraq to make it safe for democracy, and make it safe they would. Through 2005, the insurgents inflicted a hail of bomb attacks decimating the new Iraqi police and security forces. The new police forces were undertrained, possessed dubious loyalty, and were incapable of operating independently against insurgent forces.

Throughout Iraq, real power fell into the hands of local militias, both Sunni and Shiite. During this fateful time, the CPA planners in Baghdad focused on crafting an ideal constitution for Iraq. They might as well have counted the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. Without any real government worth the name, Iraqis went hungry, weren’t paid, lacked electricity for long parts of the day, and didn’t even have enough gasoline in the country with the second largest and most accessible reserves of the stuff on earth. Even Saddam started to look good, and that took some doing.

Birth of the Iraqi insurrection

Bush’s idealistic advisors, dead set on making Iraq into a nice Western-style democracy, believed Ahmed Chalabi when he said he would be hugely popular and that the U.S. Army would be greeted as liberators.

It never happened. Within twenty-three days of the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, the great Sunni insurrection against U.S. forces was already up and running. It started on May 1, 2007, the same day President George W. Bush dramatically landed on the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” On that day, U.S. soldiers in the Sunni town of Fallujah shot and killed sixteen violent demonstrators who were not carrying firearms.

The dead protesters promptly became martyrs. From Ireland to India, nothing sets mass emotions aflame and whips up widespread popular support like a dozen or more martyrs—people who can be plausibly presented as the tragic victims of the evil occupying power. Combine these inevitable flare-ups with Rumsfeld’s insistence on having almost no visible presence on the Iraqi streets, and a violent insurgency should be expected. As Machiavelli taught, making people mad at you is fine as long as they’re afraid of you. But making people mad at you without making them afraid of you is the worst mistake in the book. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and their tame CPA made that mistake in spades.

The great anti-American insurrection in Iraq over the next four years succeeded where Saddam Hussein and the most powerful and hitherto successful conventional army in the Arab world had totally failed twice. The Sunni Iraqi insurgents stymied, neutralized, and began to exhaust the U.S. armed forces that had easily wiped out the regular Iraqi army in three weeks.

The Sunni Muslim insurrection in Iraq soon attracted significant international jihadists to its ranks, and over the years they came to make up a significant number of the suicide bomber cadres who inflicted the worst mayhem on Shiite civilians and the new Iraqi armed forces.

But it didn’t start that way. Al Qaeda and other such groups did not launch the insurrection in Iraq, were not primarily responsible for its growth, and never made up more than a small minority of its active fighters. By fall 2005, U.S. military intelligence assessments in Iraq had concluded that the insurrection had reached the self-sustaining point. Even if all arms supplies and volunteers from outside the country could be cut off—and, given the paucity of U.S. ground forces in the country, that wasn’t remotely possible—the insurgency would continue at exactly the same level it had reached.

The insurgents: Not just a few troublemakers

In August 2003 Iraqi insurgents killed the United Nations envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and twenty-one members of his UN staff with an enormous truck bomb that demolished the Canal Hotel in Baghdad. The widely respected de Mello was the highest-ranking UN official to be killed in the course of duty in more than four decades. That same “Black August,” Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Baqir al-Hakim, the most senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, and eighty of his supporters were killed in another devastating car bomb attack.

PC Myth: We Don’t Need the Big, Bad Ba’athists

The Coalition Provisional Authority should have taken control of Saddam’s well-disciplined and justly feared army, paying its troops and selecting a useful general from the old regime to lead it. That part should have been easy; Saddam treated his generals like dirt, especially if they served him well and were good at their jobs.

But instead, the hapless L. Paul Bremer, apparently on orders from Rumsfeld and his right-hand men running the Pentagon at the time, dissolved the Iraqi army and issued a de-Ba’athification order eliminating anyone who had served in the Ba’ath Party from any position of official responsibility. That wasn’t a conservative way to do things: it was neo-liberal idealism at its most dangerous and stupid.

The de-Ba’athification order also ignored the practice and lessons of General George S. Patton, greatest of all U.S. combat commanders, who got into hot water after World War II by keeping former members of the Nazi Party around to ensure southern Germany didn’t collapse into famine and chaos after World War II.

For Patton understood the nature of the totalitarian state: every engineer, doctor, or technocrat worth his salt is forced to join the ruling party just to be allowed to do his job.

De-Ba’athification could have been done with discrimination and success (it would be hard to imagine it being conducted less successfully) if post-occupation investigators had focused solely on secret police killers and top party officials involved with enforcing Saddam’s most notorious and bloody initiatives.

Instead, 50,000 to 60,000 men who were the best armed and best trained in Iraq were alienated from the U.S. forces, the CPA, and any Iraqis who threw their lot in with them. And the entire Sunni community in central Iraq was sent the message that after eighty-three years of being top dog, there was going to be no hope for them at the hands of their vengeful Shiite brethren. Bremer and his young staffers in the CPA didn’t intend to send them that message. But then, they didn’t know anything about Iraq.

Naïve U.S. commentators didn’t get it. They opined that the attacks were clearly the work of a small minority (true) comprised overwhelmingly of foreigners to Iraq (false). What they didn’t realize was that Iraq was rapidly devolving into the “state of nature” described by British political philosopher Thomas Hobbes: a state without effective government, where gangs and terror groups proliferated and killed at will; a state, as Hobbes memorably put it, where life was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

PC Myth: We Don’t Need Troops on the Ground

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, obsessed with the idea that the United States could remain the world’s global hyper-power with an army marginally larger than North Korea’s, refused to authorize any extra troops or—better by far—police to keep the country calm, safe, and law-abiding during the tumultuous days and weeks after Saddam’s fall. When an orgy of rioting predictably erupted across Baghdad, Rumsfeld shrugged it off with the now-famous comment, “Stuff happens.”

Wise old Sir Herbert Dowbiggin, the tough British colonial policeman who probed the causes of the 1929 Arab riots in Palestine, could have told Rumsfeld what would happen next.

First, crucial damage was done to Iraq’s critical infrastructure, especially its electrical generating capacity and oil production facilities, with monumental impact on the nation’s recovery prospects for the following years.

Second, the Iraqi people lost whatever awe they had of the U.S. Army. (The U.S. Army, it should be remembered, flooded its occupation zone in southern Germany and all of Japan with troops after its victories at the end of World War II.)

The Sunni insurgents were culled primarily from the 20 percent Sunni minority in Iraq that had ruled the roost ever since the British crushed the 1920 Shiite revolt. They saw clearly they had no realistic stake in a “new” Iraq where the Americans were building up the Shiites to be top dog. Because Rumsfeld refused to flood Iraq with American troops to keep law and order, and because CPA head L. Paul Bremer had disbanded the old Iraqi army—which everyone in the country had been justly scared of—anarchy and terrorism ruled. New local militias, Shiite and Sunni alike, started to coalesce to give a semblance of protection to their local neighborhoods.

A Lot of Hot Air

“What got sent from Washington was a bunch of debaters. They’d sit around in the Green Zone and debate. ‘Well, I don’t know about this. Let’s try this.’ And then they’d debate it for months and months and months and months and nothing would happen.”

U.S. military combat veteran and personal injury lawyer John Smathers to Rajiv Chandrasekaran

The undermanned and overstretched U.S. forces in Iraq were rapid-movement elite combat units—the best in the world. They were not policemen and they had not been trained as counter-insurgency experts. They responded to attacks and threats as they had been trained, with overwhelming firepower and calling in air strikes when they needed them. That was the way to win conventional wars, but not to win hearts and minds in a counter-insurgency conflict. Innocent people were inevitably killed and their homes destroyed—not because our soldiers were murderers, but because they were soldiers rather than peacekeepers. Every time that happened, it was a huge political gift to the insurgents.

The insurgents also developed a new war-winning weapon that singlehandedly transformed the operational dynamics of the war: simple, old-fashioned, booby-trap bombs that earned the fancy name “improvised explosive device,” or IED. They employed shaped charges and modern explosives that rendered the Americans’ Bradley Fighting Vehicles highly vulnerable. Since September 11, Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had been showered with financial support by sympathetic Congresses like no previous Department of Defense or war in U.S. history, but Rumsfeld invested most of it into visionary, science-fiction-type, high-tech wonder systems of the future. There was no money at first to buy simple steel plates to buckle onto the sides and bottoms of U.S. combat vehicles in Iraq. Eventually, hundreds of U.S. soldiers would die or lose their limbs before that oversight was laboriously rectified.

Even after all these bungles, however, the situation could have been reversed if well-intentioned policymakers had been set on winning a guerrilla war rather than instilling a beautiful and pure parliamentary democracy in Iraq. On December 15, 2005, they unveiled their pride and joy—genuinely free and fair parliamentary elections throughout Iraq.

Bombing the Golden Mosque: The point of no return

For nearly three years after invading Iraq, U.S. policymakers imposed radical, romantic, liberal nation-building policies on the hapless country, claiming the plans were either conservative or essential for national security. In truth, the people who came up with the bright ideas and pushed them through were neither conservative in any meaningful sense nor knowledgeable about the region.

But if there was a single moment that could be called the Point of No Return, it was terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s final masterstroke. On February 22, 2006, Sunni Muslim insurgents bombed one of the most sacred shrines in Shiite Islam, the al-Askariya Mosque, or the Golden Mosque, in Samarra.

PC Myth: Democracy Can Solve Iraq’s Problems

Turnout in the Iraqi elections of December 2005 was high: 70 percent (a far higher turnout than for most U.S. elections). The Iraqi people expressed their free, democratic will loud and clear, and they voted for... more chaos and civil war.

After nearly three years of escalating terror, suffering, and chaos, the outcome should have been a predictable one: the three main ethnic or religious groups in Iraq—the Shiites of the south, the minority Sunnis of the center, and the Kurds of the north—all voted for their traditional local partisan parties. This was the same pattern seen in any seriously divided society that has suffered civil war or serious sectarian strife (Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Lebanon are a few examples). Many of the factions elected to the new parliament in Baghdad were controlled by or had strong ties to the most implacable terror groups or militias.

Shiites swept the board, winning 62 percent of the vote. Sunnis, despite being one-fifth of the population, won only 8 percent of the seats in the new parliament. The results boosted the Shiites and Kurds backed by U.S. policymakers and left the Sunnis feeling out in the cold, recalling the saying that democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner, and liberty is a well-armed lamb. The insurgents became more popular than ever in the Sunni community, and that made them more bold. Their recruiting figures soared, and so did their ability to carry out more terror attacks.

U.S. policymakers had naïvely believed the elections would suck the air out of popular Sunni support for the insurgency. Instead, it only fanned the flames. The rates at which U.S. soldiers, Iraqi security forces, and innocent—mostly Shiite—civilians were killed soared in the months following the elections.

Shiite militias around the country, especially in Baghdad, reacted at once with murderous fury. Hundreds of innocent Sunnis were shot at random or, even worse, dragged off to be tortured. Sunnis reacted by rallying behind the insurgents and other militia groups within their own community.

There was not even an independent Iraqi government yet functioning in Baghdad to pretend it could halt the mayhem. More than two months after the parliamentary elections America’s Green Zone bureaucrats were so proud of, the squabbling Iraqi political parties—most of them merely fronts for murderous militia groups—were still far from agreement about a government. And there were still far too few U.S. troops on the ground to guarantee law and order and end the killing.

Tens of thousands died as the waves of tit-for-tat random killings flowed back and forth. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled their homes to find refuge in enclaves run by militias of their own religious tradition. The power of the Sunni insurgents in their own community grew, and in the following months, the scale of terror attacks by Sunnis grew by leaps and bounds.

But the biggest beneficiaries of the al-Askariya bombing and the bloodbaths that followed were the Shiite militias, especially in Baghdad and southern Iraq. It was they, and not the ephemeral Shiite-led governments that U.S. diplomats frantically patched together, who soon came to be the real power in Shiite Iraq.

Shiite militias soon gathered vastly more power than the Sunni insurgents ever had. They had strong ties to all the new Iraqi security forces, which in reality were controlled and run by Shiite senior officers. They also had a powerful influence on the ramshackle new Iraqi governments, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s. At one time, five of Maliki’s cabinet ministers and a bloc of thirty members of the new Iraqi Parliament were loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the charismatic—and most anti-American—Shiite militia leader who runs the Mahdi Army. Sadr and his Mahdi Army remained the real power in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City within Baghdad. They are at the heart of a tight network of Shiite militias across the southern half of the country.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

American mainstream historians have paid virtually no attention to the Anglo-Jewish reconquest of Iraq in 1941. An exception is Howard M. Sachar’s superb Europe Leaves the Middle East: 1936–1954, New York: Allen Lane Publishers, 1974.

Sachar combines high scholarship with a vivid, descriptive writing style that makes the events he describes come crackling to life. His book integrates the different military campaigns during World War II and gives a rare and excellent overview.

It isn’t a civil war; it’s a splinter war

For all of 2006 and most of 2007, President Bush and his spokesmen labored to deny the obvious: a full-fledged civil war was already raging in Iraq.

In one sense, all the president’s men were telling the truth. Following the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, it wasn’t a civil war that was raging in Iraq. It was something far worse: a splinter war.

A civil war pits the government against a faction trying to take power for itself. A splinter war occurs when a central government collapses completely and lots of little militias and local groups immediately start squabbling and killing each other.

Splinter wars are the norm in Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature.” They often kill more innocents than civil wars do, because killing is random and done by lots of different groups and because public services like electricity and hospitals tend to collapse.

In April 2006 I coined another phrase to describe the kind of war the U.S. armed forces were forced to deal with in Iraq: a war according to Belfast Rules or Beirut Rules.

These are the rules that apply when national armies, occupying forces, or international peacekeepers try to maintain order and security and try to prevent the massacre of thousands of people when the central government has totally broken down. Beirut and Belfast rules apply when sectarian-based militias hold power in nations that have already splintered or fragmented into conditions of civil war. They are what U.S. soldiers now face in Baghdad.

PC Myth: Kill Zarqawi and We Win

On June 7, 2006, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by a precision U.S. air strike on a supposed safe house where he was plotting mayhem at the time. His killing was a triumph for the hard-pressed U.S. and Iraqi security forces and eliminated al Qaeda’s outstanding leader in Iraq, a man more responsible than any other for the extreme savagery of the Sunni insurgency there. Yet the year after his death saw no reduction in the insurgency’s capabilities to carry out lethal bombings against Shiite civilians. There were important reasons why this was so.

Zarqawi was a figure of the kind often found in anti-colonial and guerrilla wars of the past century. He was a merciless, brutal fanatic who was also a tactical genius and a superb operational commander. But his indiscriminate killing and his bloodlust toward fellow Muslims, especially Shiites, threatened to isolate the insurgency by mobilizing the Shiite majority in Iraq, which has three times the population of the Sunnis. Zarqawi also prioritized attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, a strategic policy that hastened his own demise.

Zarqawi’s death immediately made headlines around the world. But the level of attrition inflicted on U.S. forces in Iraq by Sunni insurgents remained high, and the insurgents were able to keep up the casualty rate.

Why did the tactical U.S. successes against al Qaeda within Iraq fail to quell the insurgency? Part of the answer is that al Qaeda and its allies had already succeeded in pulverizing the credibility of Iraq’s three democratically elected governments by the time U.S. forces could make real inroads against them.

The U.S. obsession with ambitious, cumbersome constitutional processes distracted American planners from being able to focus on the primary issues of restoring electricity and running water and having enough reliable U.S. and allied troops to ensure law and order. As a result, none of the three civilian governments of Iraq enjoyed any grassroots credibility. They were unable to deliver basic protection or reliable services to a significant portion of the population.

Even in supposedly peaceful Shiite majority provinces across southern Iraq, the government forces operate in alliance with—or at the sufferance of—a patchwork of Shiite militias that they do not control.

Killing Zarqawi didn’t come near to ending the war because al Qaeda was never the only, or even the main, arm of the Sunni resistance. By the time Zarqawi was killed, he was first among equals in a shifting coalition of anti-American Sunni militia groups. And when Zarqawi succeeded in provoking an overwhelming Shiite reaction after the al-Askariya bombing, he achieved his ultimate strategic goal of making Iraq ungovernable through the U.S.-guided democratic political process. It was tempting to think that the Iraqi people would be grateful we had freed them of their brutal dictator and that democracy and the promise of a brighter future would overwhelm their bitterness and tribalism, but such hopeful dreams “misoverestimated” the Iraqi people.

U.S. grand strategy in Iraq, in its obsession with Zarqawi and al Qaeda, never confronted the messy religious and ethnic political and paramilitary realities of the country. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remained convinced that once Zarqawi was hunted down and killed and al Qaeda’s operational command structure was smashed, then the Sunni insurgency would evaporate and peaceful, democratic political processes would at last triumph in Iraq.

But it did not happen that way.

Why the surge couldn’t tame Baghdad

There were many reasons why the much heralded 2007 “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq, focused on Baghdad, could never have worked.

During the first few months of the surge, militia killings in Baghdad fell significantly. But at the same time, Baghdad fell ever more tightly under the control of a web of violent Shiite militias while the Shiite-dominated national government was simultaneously powerless to stop it and passively complicit in the process. And in the summer of 2007, even as violence was dropping rapidly in Anbar Province, it was rising again to its old levels in Baghdad.

The surge also demonstrated the futility of those armchair strategists and “warrior” pundits and politicians back in the United States who had talked so glibly about “unleashing” the U.S. armed forces to bring security to Baghdad.

For neither the American armed forces nor the ramshackle Iraqi parliamentary-democratic system that U.S. authorities imposed on Iraq could bring peace, prosperity, security, or basic guaranteed daily services to the Iraqi capital. For these services, the people of Baghdad in 2006 and 2007 came to rely on their neighborhood militias. Like the mafia in crime-ridden cities of old, the Shiite militias became the real government of the Iraqi capital.

And when militia forces are deeply rooted in their own local community strongholds and are seen by enough of their inhabitants as the community’s defenders, war against them is seen as war against the entire community.

That is the nightmare scenario U.S. armed forces were facing in Baghdad in the closing months of 2007 when forced to fight a campaign of annihilation or repression against the dominant Shiite militias in Baghdad.

In theory, by busting up militias, U.S. soldiers would be carrying out the work of the democratic government of Iraq, and thus doing the people’s will. In the people’s eyes, however, a foreign occupying force was warring against the only institutions holding their communities together.

The more U.S. firepower and military force used against the militias—and the more civilian casualties concomitantly inflicted—the more the Shiite population of Baghdad would become bitterly opposed to the U.S. presence. As the conflict escalated, U.S military forces would become embattled and besieged. The Iraqi government—a government in little more than name—at best would try to help ineffectually, and at worst could easily become a conduit for intelligence and sabotage on behalf of the Shiite militias.

The U.S. Army historically has had little experience of the complexities, viciousness, and enormous casualties that full-scale street fighting in an urban environment can generate. Americans should pray they never have to learn.