Mark Bowden had a smart op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal about why violence continues in Iraq. It’s unfortunately only available by subscription, but here’s a key excerpt:

Saddam had long since ceased to be the beloved figure he believed himself to be. In this stubborn insurgency there has been little evidence of him as a rallying point. His death did not provoke violent recriminations or even much angry rhetoric. Once he was toppled, once deprived of his vicious state apparatus, he ceased to be relevant. Just as the resistance never stopped or even slowed after his capture, the deaths of his sons or the arrests or killings of the other leading Baathist figures on the notorious U.S. military deck of cards, it will not be affected by his death. Saddam was bigger than the bloody divisions that now preoccupy his people. None of the various murderous factions are fighting for his vision of a greater Iraq. The Sunnis are fighting to resist Shiite domination, the Shiites to rid themselves of Sunni oppression, and the Islamists just to frustrate the democratic vision of the U.S.

We Americans consistently underestimate the deep hatreds that divide people. Our political system is designed to wrestle peacefully with the divisions of race, class, ethnicity, religion and competing ideological or geographical interests, and has generally worked as intended — the Civil War being the one glaring exception. Generations have struggled to live up to ideals of tolerance and diversity. When we look out at the world, we tend to see millions longing to get past the blood feuds, to be, in short, more like us. George Bush and the neocon intellectuals who led us into Iraq are just the latest in a long line of evangelical Americanists. No matter how many times history slaps us in the face, the dream persists.

This is a point that I have blogged about before — that peaceful settlement of sectarian disputes comes through acceptance of a political process (see a blog entry, here). We have a process that more or less works in the United States; war-torn countries like Iraq (and Lebanon and Somalia) do not. And the locals in those countries have to get tired of fighting and to see that they are unlikely to achieve their goals through fighting before they will make the political decisions needed to resolve disputes another way. No amount of American power can insulate Iraqis (or Lebanese or Somalis, etc.) from that fact.

Related posts:

1. Getting History Right
2. Put Up or Shut Up
3. When stress becomes fatal
4. Out with the old, in with the new
5. There Can Be No Privileged Perch