[nradov]

US foreign policy might have exacerbated some tribal or sectarian conflicts but historically those groups have never gotten along very well. There is a long history of violence stretching back centuries before the US even existed.

[lyu07282]

I think you downplaying it, but I understand the need to defend the US at all times. A source on the matter for example:

> "This analysis paper begins by examining how the U.S. occupation effectively dismantled the Iraqi state post-2003, paving the way for sectarian conflict and allowing for armed groups and sectarian elites to fill the resulting gap. It explores the weaponization of sect and identity and its devastating consequences for the country. The second part focuses on the Baath Party-enforced political and institutional order to explain how the former regime was able to constrain the space for group identities."

> "Sectarianism would not have become the powerful, destructive force that it did were it not for the weaponization of identity and sect by the exiled opposition and a series of disastrous post-conflict reconstruction policies"

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Sectari...

[benreesman]

I think John Dolan's take is the ruthlessly honest one: some neighborhoods are rougher than others, and that's not a parochial or imperialist sentiment a-priori the way some would try to paint it (the Troubles are far too recent to think that white/Empire-descended people have forgotten real sectarian conflict).

Saddam Hussein was siting on top of one of the most complex and high-intensity sectarian fault lines on Earth (not unlike other Baathist proto-commies-turned-strongmen who have since been replaced by Islamist hardliners) and he kept order with the kinds of brutality that keep order when salients like that are in play.

I don't know what the long-term humane solution will be, but it won't be sanctimonious twittering on the heels of an Arc Light strike. I think self-determination is an easy talk to talk but a harder walk to walk for cultures like America.