hould the Allies have planned better for the sftermath?…have retained more of Saddam's men for the rebuild? Well, yes, no doubt. But it was always going to be a nightmare with Iran next door. A Sunni regime, that they'd been at war with just a couple of decades back, ruling over a Shia majority, finally overthrown?…of course they were going to take every opportunity to interfere. And of course they did.
And yes…Syria. Iraq and Syria were the two Ba'athist dictatorships. Of the two, at the time, Saddam's regime was surely the more brutal – as anyone who read Kenan Makiya's Republic of Fear or Cruelty and Silence will attest – with psychopathic sons Uday and Qusay waiting in the wings. The West overthrew Saddam, but Obama declined to intervene in Syria, having learnt the orthodox line that Iraq had been a disaster. Result? The disaster of Syria dwarfed that of Iraq: some 600,ooo slain, millions fleeing the country, Putin testing out his aerial bombardment of civilians and hospitals ready for Ukraine…
Patrikarakos is having none of it. That's clealry not one of the orthodoxies he has in mind:
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historic mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought.”
Well OK. But note that “We had so much hope in the beginning”. Should we really have left Saddam in charge, defying UN sanctions, terrorising his people with a secret police force and a prison system of torture and death that put Syria's in the shade? And who's to blame that it didn't work out after Saddam's overthrow led to that hope in the hearts of so many Iraqis? Yes, we should have done better. But might Iran not take some of the blame? The Iraqi politicians, even?
Ah….where's Christopher Hitchens now we need him?
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