Iraq Confidential: Explaining how the three main Iraqi communities, the Kurds, the Shia and the Sunni, responded to the growing conflict, and occupation that followed, we answer ‘what next’. The Occupation and its Legacy, P.2.
Iraq in Fragments: Iraq's civil war is the messy end of a country that never worked as a voluntary union and that brought misery to most of its people most of the time. By invading Iraq and mismanaging the aftermath, the United States precipitated Iraq 's collapse as a unified state but did not cause it. Partition-the Iraqi solution-has produced stability in most of the country and for this reason should be accepted. In Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, the United States can not contribute to the solution because there is no solution, at least in the foreseeable future. It is a tragedy, and it is unsatisfying to admit that there is little that can be done about it. But it is so. No purpose is served by a prolonged American presence anywhere in Arab Iraq. The war's architects believed they could change the Middle East. And so they did. The Occupation and its Legacy, P.3.
