Bush’s in-house disaster capitalists didn’t wipe Iraq clean, they just stirred it up. Rather than a tabula rasa, purified of history, they found ancient feuds, brought to the surface to merge with fresh vendettas from each new attack—on a mosque in Karbala, in Samarra, on a market, a ministry, a hospital. Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.
