Gerard Baker of the WSJ editorial page has been examining the reflections on the Iraq War 20 years later. Baker has repented of his own views and thinks that those defending the outcome based on alternate histories where there was some bloodletting between Sunni and Shia are fooling themselves:

It is astonishingly blithe to say of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the internecine strife that took place under the supervision of the U.S. that they might have died in any case. What kind of vacuum of conscience does it take to balance a known historical tragedy against a hypothetical one and conclude that they have equal moral weight?

Indeed. Iraq is a freer country now than it was under Saddam, and it is relieved of the peculiar grotesqueries of his sons. But depending on which group you belonged to, the past 20 years have included worse terrors than what the Hussein family tended to inflict. I can’t believe so many in the conservative movement would praise Iraq, in unqualified terms, as a free country, without mentioning the ethnic cleansing it has undergone since the invasion. More than 80 percent of Iraqi Christians have been killed or exiled. If 1 million of any other ethnic group had suffered the same, would American conservatives still praise Iraq for its freedom? Upwards of 200,ooo Yazidis still live in refugee camps in 2023.

Iraq is also noticeably poorer than it was. Electricity is scarcer now in 2023 than it was in 2003. Its political freedom doesn’t extend to every critic of the government. There’s nothing to brag about in Iraq.