As U.S. troops prepare to leave Iraq after eight years of war, many are wondering how things went so wrong. How could the best minds think this artificial country could be transformed into a functioning democracy? The moderate Iraqi candidate who won the most votes in the last election was denied power by a coalition of Shiite parties headed by a formerly Iranian-based Dawa Party under Nouri al-Maliki and an explicitly anti-American party headed by Muqtada al-Sadr, which will continue ruling after U.S. troops leave. The northern semi-autonomous Kurdish region fears this pro-Iranian coalition and threatens succession if the central government exerts control, to which the foreign minister replied: a “unified” nation is essential. Sectarian strife has now erupted in Sunni Anbar, Baghdad, Babil, Ramadi and elsewhere. The result is renewed sectarian violence and the elimination of a counter to the region’s major threat, Iran, whose ayatollah leadership could not be more pleased about the results.

After the sacred sacrifice of so many brave American lives and the wounding of thousands more, how could this have happened? Was it impossible to foresee the results? Could Saddam Hussein be contained without hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground, threatened from all sides hiding in civilian clothes? Was democracy ever an option in the Middle East? Unfortunately, any reasonably knowledgeable person could have predicted the results. Here is a column written four months before Bush’s decision to invade Iraq titled “Unfriendly Turf for Democracy” published in The Washington Times way back on November 20, 2002 just after the Republicans had regained control of both houses of Congress.

Since Iraq was drawn on the maps of a faraway colonial office in 1921, it has generated dozens of coups, eight Kurdish revolts, nine Shi’ite uprisings and three pogroms, all before Saddam imposed his terrible order on the local factions. He then allied his secular Arab revivalist Ba’athists with the minority Muslim Sunnis and Christian Chaldeans, who feared a united fundamentalism more than Saddam. Revolts since then have killed 100,000 Iraqi Kurds and 30,000 Shi’ites. Playing well with others is not a high priority in old Mesopotamia. While of pluralism there is aplenty, it is not the benign type required for a democracy.

Many think an American presence would at least assist ally Israel. A war with Iraq diverts attention from Jerusalem, shifts Arab anger eastward and inserts the American colossus as a stabilizing force into the region during the occupation that would follow a hopefully easy U.S. military victory. The lifting of the burden at the beginning would seem like salvation; but it is difficult also to see how Israel’s military self-assurance could last the years required for regional regime change once its citizens (and the terrorists) realized the Americans were the real protectors in the region. Could even its universal military service be sustained, much less its fighting élan?

Freedom in the West took centuries. But could a U.S. occupation to build a democracy persevere even 20 years? American troops have been in the Balkans for less than a decade but pressure to bring the troops home, especially when they rest upon the wide use of reserves, builds quickly in a democracy. Recently, the U.S. defense secretary requested that European troops replace his in Yugoslavia. After several years, American forces gave up on building democracy in Haiti and departed. Somalia was a rout, as was Lebanon before it. There are places in harm’s way where U.S. military forces have stayed longer, such as in Western Europe or Korea but not if they remain under hostile fire

History tells the story of another Western settlement in the Mideast that was enormously successful for a very long time. The Crusaders occupied Jerusalem for a century and held on to Acre for almost an additional hundred years. Ultimately, though, Europe tired of the burden and laid it down. Even Constantinople was more deserted by Venice, Rome and the West than won by the Muslims. The English and French empires in the region likewise ended more by exhaustion than military defeat. The West quickly tires of Mideast violence and intrigue.

President Bush encouraged the nation-builders by saying he would like to assist “the institutions of liberty” in the region. But the president also said he had not yet decided whether to commit troops, much less to support nation-building. But his spokesman did encourage a coup and a single-bullet solution. To date, he has not even been dragged into transforming Afghanistan into a Western democracy. Mr. Bush has a pragmatic streak and did forswear nation-building during his presidential campaign. He just may be clever enough to eliminate the Saddam threat without the hubris of thinking he can recreate the world in his own image.

That was nine years ago, remember, even before a decision was made to invade Iraq. Unfortunately, President Bush’s romantic idealism won over his pragmatic realism, deciding to bring democracy to such unfriendly turf. After the war began, the same author was invited by the Secretary of Defense to tour Iraq in November 2003 to evaluate results, which were reported in a following Human Events article.

Death was shadowing us, just one day behind, as we flew across Iraq on our Department of Defense observation mission. The day after rotoring into downtown Baghdad, to the “safe” U.S. headquarters green zone, it was hit by mortar fire and American soldiers were killed and injured. Subsequent to our visit to the Polish forces in the pacified South, these allies suffered their first combat death, followed by many more Italians a few days later. We expected danger in Saddam Hussein’s home of Tikrit and they struck–downing an incoming helicopter just after we left, with all lives lost, along the same flightpath as our own.

That week was the bloodiest of the war, the most American military personnel killed in action since President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat. You read about the four to six soldiers dieing every day and the 40 wounded–but it is just a statistic. You see a bomb set at the Red Cross on TV and the scores killed and hundreds of U.S. and Iraqis maimed but it does not seem real. But it unquestionably hits home when you are riding through a black Iraqi night in a darkened C-130 military aircraft with an unidentified soldier who had been killed that day, as we did one sobering evening.

The problems in Iraq are immense, for there is no solution to the centuries-old division of the nation. In the North, the non-Arab Kurds are divided into two often-warring parties that are only cooperating now because both are determined to first remove the Arabs from their midst and guarantee their own autonomy. The Arab Shiites in the South split into the Iran-rooted Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Islamiyah, the Muqtada Sadr radical faction, its Ayatollah Ali Sistani-led opposition, the London-based Khoei Foundation and numerous mullahs and sheiks. And, of course, there is the so-called Arab Sunni triangle in the West-center of the country, where most of the violence is centered, and the Baghdad dangerous mixture of Sunni and Shi’a with a restive urban underclass that makes the place look like the sci-fi movie, Escape from New York, with Jersey walls piled 20 feet tall to keep the vandals out.

Area by area, as we traveled around—even with the violence—it is just conceivable that each might be pacified. But when one mixes these inflammable regional rivalries, it will ignite as surely as any other unstable chemical reaction. To create a nationwide democracy from this artificial nation carved in London during the zenith of colonialism would truly take forever. As Middle East expert Daniel Pipes concludes, any Western occupier of a Muslim population “will eventually be worn down by the violence directed against it and give up.” This is why the present President George W. Bush’s father rejected going to Baghdad and occupying Iraq in the first Gulf War. As George H.W. Bush said in his memoir: “Had we gone the invasion route [to Baghdad], the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.

As George W. Bush was considering whether to hold to his deadline to remove U.S. troops by June 30, 2004, an April 7 column by the same source reported:

No matter how long the U.S. remains, the religious and ethnic divisions will persist. As the continuing incidents and casualties in Bosnia and Kosovo prove, the ethnic and religious realities remain even after a decade of force and democracy lectures. So, it will be better to get out now with as few causalities as possible. June 30 will be the last chance. If that date is slipped, the president loses the initiative and the U.S. will be there for decades.

Fortunately, it only took one decade as U.S. troops are now on the way out. Unfortunately, they have left behind a Shiite majority in control that is determined to impose its version of Islam, a Sunni minority determined not to adopt what they consider that Muslim heresy and a Kurd region ready to secede – all facing a much larger Shiite Iran on the verge of nuclear weapons with no regional power any longer able to contain it. Incredibly, nothing is learned: the same U.S. “democratic idealism” still survives today about Libya. President Barack Obama proclaims democracy around the corner while the new Libyan military commander, Abdulhakim Belhadj, and a majority of his troops proudly identify themselves as committed Islamists.

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.