"you got rid of one Saddam and you left us with 50."

This is a good article from the Guardian on the situation in Iraq. A historian visited Iraq and not surprisingly came up with the conclusion that the Americans really messed up the invasion, ignored realities of the nation and made things much worse than it was under Saddam. This is best summed up by what one Iraqi said in the article which is both the title of the article and of this post. By ignoring skeptics, critics and informed experts on Iraq, the American Bush-led administration, as well as UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, rushed into Iraq with a simplistic and short-sighted mission to topple Saddam and take over the country. This initially succeeded but when it came to the nitty-gritty of running the country and helping Iraqis rebuild a post-Saddam society, they failed miserably. Of course, there are accusations, quite a lot of them actually, that the Americans were never really interested in helping the Iraqi people and were just interested in oil. But that's another story of course.

About the civil struggles that have broken out between Sunni, Shiite and Kurd elements, historian Charles Tripp had this to say- "...we were trying to say that there was a complex society in Iraq which shouldn't be reduced to the caricature of Saddam Hussein sitting upon the oppressed masses. The oppressed masses have their own agenda - and sometimes they're very nasty indeed."