Would Iraq Be In The Mess It Is Today Without Us As in The U.S.?

Writes Matt Rowe in Comments here:

You know, we went into Iraq under false pretenses...I leave it up to historians to determine whether it was a lie or a mistake...and we certainly handled the de-Baathification and the CPA's management of the immeditate post war issues very badly. Nonetheless, the violence being perpetrated against the Iraqi people is coming from other Iraqi people who have the ability to stop it, if they want to. The world is blaming the US for starting a civil conflict that has been brewing for centuries. We were certainly the catalyst to it all, but it was coming sooner or later no matter what.

Well, I think we disgree on some points and I respect your wish to "wait and see" whether mere mistakes (although those were some gargantuan mistakes) or actual lies took us into Iraq. Even then, I think the lies are fairly proven now.

But as for whether Iraq would be the mess it is now without our intervention, I first have to agree that is was the U.S.'s right and responsibility to go in there; I do not believe we had either, certainly not after we left them so badly after the first Iraq war. A huge part of the reason we see this horrible sectarian hatred is:

Bush I went in only to save wealthy Kuwaitis (his apparently sole interest in the whole Iraq campaign; he got Kurds and others to rise up against Saddam Hussein, but left them to be massacred, tortured, to live in even worse conditions than before (except for those Kurds who were able to organize and live in the northern No Fly zone).

Bush II's campaign did not factor any of this in. And this again is a huge mistake. Actually, it's more than a mistake. It's calculated and quite criminal negligence. We have handled Iraq badly the first time around, and exponentially worse the second time.

So yeah, I'll buy that some sectarian hatred was to be expected OUTSIDE of Bush I and II intervention, but it is directly and calculatedly what Bush I and II did in their campaigns that has rendered this so bad, so ugly, so not able to be fixed with a bandaid or a Bush Administration (likely mispronounced) platitude.