“When we left, we did not leave Iraq in a state where it could function effectively,” Dexter Filkins says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. More than a decade after the start of the Iraq War, Filkins says, “we left the job unfinished. And now we’re watching it, I think, come apart.” Filkins, who recently wrote about Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, joins George Packer and host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss America’s role in the turmoil that continues to trouble the Middle East.
Yesterday, Iraqis voted in parliamentary elections. The elections, Packer says, show, despite “all the horror, the tragedy, the death, this persistent desire to be counted.”
“The whole center of the Middle East is starting to crack up, and, as much as we in the United States are exhausted by these things and would like to avert our gaze, it will be very hard to do that in the future,” Filkins says.
For more reporting from the Middle East, read Filkins on the Iranian operative Qassem Suleimani; Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria; and the future of Hezbollah.
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Photograph: Moises Saman/Magnum.
