Sennholz’s May 2003 essay reads the Iraq War through history, political economy, and a libertarian theory of postwar reconstruction. Writing just after the American and British invasion, he argues that Saddam Hussein’s military defeat does not by itself solve Iraq’s deeper institutional problem. The task is not merely to replace rulers, but to move from dictatorship, command economics, and sectarian struggle toward decentralized government, civil liberty, private property, and markets.
He begins by setting modern Iraq against the much older civilizational memory of Mesopotamia. Iraq should not be reduced to Saddam, Baathism, or the imagery of war; its ancient legal, commercial, and artistic achievements show a society with a long search for order. Yet the essay quickly turns from that inheritance to modern political violence.
The history of modern Iraq is a record of bloody revolution, rebellions, coups, and wars.
Sennholz traces that violence through Ottoman rule, the British mandate, monarchy, coups, Baathist consolidation, war with Israel, war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, sanctions, revolts, and repression. Saddam’s regime appears not only as personal tyranny but as the culmination of militarized Arab socialism. The command economy’s shortages, black markets, unemployment, controls, and inflation are treated as predictable effects of political control over economic life.
The invasion, in Sennholz’s account, removed the dictator but also exposed how little genuine social order the dictatorship had created. A centralized apparatus could be shattered faster than a free order could be built.
It crushed the old political order and left the economy in confusion and disarray. Above all, it left the command system with no one in command.
Sennholz is therefore wary of triumphalist rhetoric. He acknowledges the fears generated by September 11 and weapons-of-mass-destruction claims, but stresses that the 2003 war lacked the broad legitimacy of the 1991 coalition. More importantly, he warns that regime change may inflame Islamic resentment if experienced as foreign occupation. Hussein’s fall does not abolish the nationalist, socialist, theocratic, and anti-Western ideas that sustained dictatorship.
His alternative is not immediate national democracy. Iraq’s Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Turkmen, and other communities make centralized elections dangerous because national office would become the prize of sectarian struggle. Majority rule, without liberal institutions, could produce clerical domination or revenge politics rather than freedom.
At this time, national elections surely would not produce a secular, pro-American, democratic republic.
Sennholz instead recommends local self-government, freedom of movement, free speech and press, secure property, and open markets. Local elections lower the stakes of power by letting communities govern without forcing every group into one national contest. Markets, for him, are peace-making institutions because exchange rewards cooperation across ethnic and religious lines.
Only the market order, which has no borders and makes no ethnic or religious distinctions, would bring peace and prosperity to Iraqi society.
The essay’s lasting significance is its early distinction between military victory and liberal reconstruction. Sennholz condemns Saddam but rejects the idea that Washington can design freedom from above. Postwar Iraq, as he frames it, is a test of whether power will again be centralized and fought over, or whether decentralized law, property, and exchange can let plural communities coexist.
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