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Saddam was a terrible dictator, but what the US created was much, much worse. We can learn something from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Toppling a dictator does

Saddam was a terrible dictator, but what the US created was much, much worse. We can learn something from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Toppling a dictator doesn't automatically create a new, civilized society. Even promising uprisings like the Libyan uprising of 2011 don't guarantee a good outcome. In Iraq, the US created a huge power vacuum by decapitating the state — removing not just Saddam, but the entire civil and military leadership, through Paul Bremer's completely misguided process of "de-Baathification". There was no power structure left to ensure the continuity of Iraqi society. Even clerk-level Baathists were dismissed, people in charged of everything from health care to utilities. It's like nobody on the US side had studied any history whatsoever.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> It's like nobody on the US side had studied any history whatsoever. It certainly seemed like that, though its more likely the actual problem was that the people at the highest levels of authority on the US side consistently ignored and overrode the people that had studied history and learned from it, listening instead to the people that had not, because the latter were saying more pleasing to the decision-makers ideological preconceptions. Its not like the uniformed military leadership of the time somehow, in a historical aberration, managed to include only people who were completely ignorant of every past experience of occupation of formerly-hostile territory everywhere, including the occupations of Japan and Germany after WWII.