1115.org

Now that people are openly talking about the possibility of civil war in Iraq, someone needs to stand up and take responsibility for the kidnappings, the beheadings, the bombings, the assassinations, and whatever assorted sectarian bloodshed that has occurred recently.

Hey may have spent the last three years in spider holes or in jail, but didn’t you know that this is all Saddam Hussein’s fault?

President Bush said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.
[…]
Bush said that Saddam was a tyrant and used violence to exacerbate sectarian divisions to keep himself in power, and that as a result, deep tensions persist to this day.

“The enemies of a free Iraq are employing the same tactics Saddam used, killing and terrorizing the Iraqi people in an effort to foment sectarian division,” Bush said.

Before anyone starts angrily typing me about how I’m some kind of Saddam lover, let me say right away that the president is right—Saddam was indeed a tyrant. And he certainly didn’t hesitate to use violence against Iraq’s Shiites in order to keep himself in power. His crimes are lengthy and documented.

But despite Saddam’s evil acts, to blame Iraq’s current crisis entirely on him is more convenient than it is accurate. Flare-ups between Sunni and Shiite muslims have been occurring for centuries, and Britain’s decision to create Iraq, with warring factions and sects intact, in the years following World War I certainly didn’t help things along. Saddam used these divisions to his own advantage, but they were there long before he took power.

So what does this have to do with Bush’s statement? None of Iraq’s history—from long-standing tensions between the sects, to the problems inherent in Iraq’s formation, to Saddam’s death squads—would have been unknown to us before we decided to go in there ourselves. We were warned by experts and diplomats about what could happen, and summarily ignored them. We went in expecting to have a quick and relatively bloodless conflict, where the Iraqis would be so happy to be rid of Saddam that everything else would fall right into place. We had no plan to deal with the kind of violence that we now face, even though the potential for such violencel should have been apparent from even a cursory glance at Iraq’s history and demographics.

Obviously, the United States didn’t create the conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites. But once we decided to go to war, Iraq became our responsibility, warts and all. To blame all the problems on Saddam three years later seems like a cop-out, especially when we should have anticipated those problems in the first place.

There is some progress, however—now that Iraq is liberated, both sides of the Sunni/Shiite split are free to perform atrocities on the other while Saddam eats Doritos in his cell.