Iraq’s not our fight

If there’s anything the current situation in Iraq tells us, it’s that the U.S. invasion of that country in 2003 set loose sectarian and ethnic conflicts that continue to threaten the country’s stability.

That’s because Iraq is a country in name only. When the victorious Europeans drew its borders shortly after World War I, they disregarded 2,000 years of tribal and sectarian differences. Kurds, Armenians, Turks, Shiites and Sunnis, all with their own territories and historic grievances, were suddenly expected to get along.

It was a pressure cooker of a country, one that Saddam Hussein kept from exploding only by creating a brutal climate of fear. When the United States invaded and disbanded the Iraqi state, including the military, the lid came off, and more than 100,000 Iraqis and nearly 5,000 American troops died trying to put it back on.

The underlying sectarian divide became abundantly evident in 2006, when civil war broke out between Shiites and Sunnis. By the time American troops left in 2012, the conflict had been brought under control, but the division remained.

The current insurgency is a mixed bag of fundamentalist jihadis, angry Sunnis and unemployed ex-Baathists. Theirs is an alliance of convenience. As the Iraqi army begins to fight back—as it now seems to be doing—the alliance is likely to come undone.

At this point the best thing the U.S. can do is nothing. Bombing the insurgents, as some have urged, would just drive more men to join them.

Gen. Colin Powell once famously said, warning of the possible consequences of invading Iraq, “If you break it, you own it.” Well, we broke it, we owned it for a while, but then the Iraqis took it back. Now it’s up to them.