The medieval Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali believed one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny. It is a hard saying, the truth of which the American writer Robert Kaplan was persuaded only after bitter personal experience. A veteran correspondent who had reported from the Balkans, Yemen, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, he supported the Iraq War in the belief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny could only benefit the country. Instead, when he returned embedded with US marines in the first battle of Fallujah in April 2004, he found
“something far worse than even the Iraq of the 1980s: the bloody anarchy of all against all that Saddam’s regime, through the most extreme brutality, had managed to suppress. The clinical depression I suffered for years afterward because of my mistake about the Iraq War led me to write this book. I had failed my test as a realist… I helped promote a war in Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. These, taken together, have burdened my sleep for decades, wrecking me at times and motivating me to write this book.”
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