What’s Next? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.
The removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a straightforward case of toppling a brutal dictator whose rule had left Iraq in ruins. Saddam, a Sunni who ruled over a Shia-majority country, ran a semi-secular Ba’athist regime that prioritized his personal power, military adventures, and clan loyalties above everything else. His invasions of Iran and Kuwait, combined with sanctions and internal repression, plunged the Iraqi people into poverty, isolation, and constant fear.
When U.S. forces pulled him down, Shia communities across Iraq took to the streets in genuine celebration. They had endured decades of marginalization, mass executions like those in 1991 after the Gulf War uprising, and systematic discrimination. Any voice opposing that jubilation at the time risked being seen as defending a tyrant who had gassed Kurds and tortured Shia clerics. Resisting the toppling meant siding with the oppressor.
What followed, though, the descent into chaos, sectarian bloodletting, and civil war, was not primarily the fault of removing Saddam. The real driver was the 14-century-old rift between Sunni and Shia Islam, a theological and political divide that had simmered under authoritarian control but exploded once the lid came off. Saddam had suppressed Shia religious expression and kept Sunni dominance in the military and government, but he wasn’t running a purely sectarian state. He used Ba’athist ideology to paper over divisions. Once he was gone, old grievances resurfaced with vengeance.
Shia militias and parties, empowered by the new majority-rule system, pushed back against what they saw as centuries of Sunni privilege. Sunnis, suddenly disenfranchised and facing de-Ba’athification that stripped them of jobs and influence, felt targeted. The bombing of the Samarra shrine in 2006 ignited full-scale sectarian war, with death squads on both sides. Al-Qaeda in Iraq exploited Sunni anger, morphing into ISIS later on.
The infrastructure for violence was there, tribal networks, armed groups, foreign meddling from Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the theological narratives of victimhood and divine right fueled it. Removing Saddam didn’t create the enmity; it simply removed the force that had kept it contained.
The Divine Mandate
Contrast that with what is happening in Iran right now, following the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The two situations look superficially similar, people dancing in the streets, chants against the regime, celebrations in Tehran and diaspora communities, but they are fundamentally different.
Khamenei wasn’t just another dictator. He was the Supreme Leader, the representative of Imam Mahdi in the Twelver Shia worldview, the living link to divine guidance in a system built on Welayat-el faqih, the guardianship of the Islamic jurist. For millions of hardcore believers in Iran, the regime doesn’t merely have political legitimacy; it has a theological mandate straight from God. Killing Khamenei isn’t toppling a secular strongman; it’s striking at the heart of a theocratic order that positions itself as the guardian of eschatological truth until the Hidden Imam returns.
