I don't think America fully understands that there was a civil war there between Sunni and Shia Iraqis between the years 2006-2008. That's how I learned what modern civil wars look like. It's a militia from one neighborhood going into the next neighborhood and rounding up a bunch of the military-aged males at night, torturing them, executing them, and then leaving their mutilated bodies in a ditch for their neighbors to find. Violence messaging. Bombing marketplaces to target the other side's innocent families. Mexican cartel war shit. All because we created a power vacuum after removing Saddam and dissolving the Iraqi military. We put thousands of young--mostly Sunni--military men into unemployment in an economy that just got destroyed while the insurgency was offering money to anyone willing to dig holes in the road and/or place explosive devices into said holes. Sometimes those bombs went off against Americans, sometimes they went off against the Iraqi police or politicians, and sometimes they went off against Shia civilians. It was a fucking mess there for at least two years, and that's before we start talking about ISIS and US troops killing people on the road in "escalation of force" incidents.