New York Review of Books

The damage inflicted on Iraq over the past two decades is almost immeasurable: at least 210,000 people, mostly civilians, killed; the destruction of Mosul; a flood of refugees desperate to escape from the country by any means possible; and millions of traumatized survivors.

In the Review’s March 21 issue, Joshua Hammer reviews two recent books about life in Iraq since the United States invaded in 2003. The ensuing bloody chaos—and the decades of deprivation, from international sanctions and the depredations of Saddam Hussein’s regime, that preceded it—have left the nation shattered into dozens of factions and sects, leaving the country, Hammer notes, newly vulnerable to “the conflagration in Gaza.”

Below, alongside Hammer’s article, we have compiled a selection of essays about the devastation of Iraq.

Joshua Hammer
Iraq’s Twenty Years of Carnage

Two journalists give eyewitness accounts of the immeasurable damage inflicted on Iraq since the US invasion.

Fred Kaplan
Why Did We Invade Iraq?

“When it came to invading Iraq, Bush truly turns out to have been ‘the decider.’… Under Bush, there was ‘no “process” of any kind,’ at any stage of the war, from the decision to invade to figuring out how post-Saddam Iraq should be governed.”

Aziz Ahmad
Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq

Even in parts of Mosul itself, reconquered in 2017 by government forces after a long and costly campaign, the ominous black-and-white ISIS flag has flown again in recent months, causing panic and fear in village after village.

Hugh Eakin
The Devastation of Iraq’s Past

“With the fall of the Baathist regime, hundreds of poor farmers and villagers—often backed by armed militias—were turning to archaeological plunder; in some Dhi Qar towns, such as al-Fajr, the black market trade in antiquities was accounting for upward of 80 percent of the local economy.”

Christian Caryl
What About the Iraqis?

“What we know about the lives of individual Iraqis rarely goes beyond the fleeting opinion quote or the civilian casualty statistics. We have little impression of Iraqis as people trying to live lives that are larger and more complex than the war that engulfs them, and more often than not we end up viewing them merely as appendages of conflict.”

Shaul Bakhash
Why the War Will Get Worse

“Following the Iranian revolution in February last year, small-scale fighting, a feature of the period before 1975, began to occur again along the land frontier between the two countries. But there were other sources of friction. Over half the inhabitants in Iraq—like the Iranians—are Shi’ite Muslims, while political power in Iraq is in the hands of the Sunni Muslim minority. Khomeini’s militant Islamic message exerts a powerful attraction on Iraq’s Shi’ites, raising fears in Baghdad that Iraq’s always fragile balance between different ethnic groups would be upset.”

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