They came. They ruined. They handed us back to the same old enemies. This is how a war supposedly fought for security can end: with a country left carrying the consequences long after the soldiers who invaded it have gone.

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offer a record of military intervention that is impossible to separate from the destruction of institutions, displacement, sectarian violence and the weakening of societies supposedly being protected. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the post-9/11 wars produced between 4.5 million and 4.7 million direct and indirect deaths and displaced more than 38 million people. Iraq remains the clearest example of how quickly the promise of security can become a prolonged political and human disaster.

The 2003 invasion was justified through the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and represented an urgent danger. The weapons were not found. The Iraq Survey Group did not discover an active Iraqi WMD stockpile, while later official investigations exposed serious failures in the intelligence used to support the pre-war case. Saddam’s dictatorship and his previous use of chemical weapons were real. What collapsed was the proposition that Iraq possessed the active WMD capability used to justify the invasion. Yet the war went ahead, and the United States then faced the far more difficult question of what would replace the state it had destroyed. The occupation did not simply remove Saddam Hussein while preserving Iraq’s governmental machinery. Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 1 imposed sweeping de-Ba’athification, while Order No.........

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