Much of what can be said about Iraq overwhelms the mind; it’s hard to even know where to begin. Like so many in the Middle East, people see what happened in Iraq as a civil war, perhaps even as a struggle against a dictator. Why then should I, an Arab from elsewhere, care? We were trained to think this way: to look inward, to stake only what is ours, to repeat the hollow mantras of Egypt first, and Lebanon first, and so many other neighboring countries. A logic unmistakably, obviously mirrored in “America First.”

This conditioning of the collective mind did not emerge from nowhere; it was institutionalized through decades of “postcolonial” state-building projects, through national education systems designed by departing colonial powers, through media that celebrated bounded sovereignty while ignoring how that sovereignty had already been compromised. The Arab League itself, founded in 1945, enshrined this logic of separate nation-states even as it claimed pan-Arab solidarity. Each state learned to police its own borders, to suppress internal dissent in the name of national unity, to view neighboring Arab populations as foreign rather than our own people and extended community. This outcome didn’t emerge organically from the natural progression of human societies but rather was deliberately engineered to divide populations, benefiting certain interests while tearing apart formerly unified nations and setting them against one another.

Such slogans mentioned above are repeated as a way of celebrating one’s own “nation,” but what if we think beyond the surface? By putting Egypt first or Syria first, what comes as second? And what is entirely left out of the equation? Slogans, like many other things, condition us to focus only on immediate concerns, discarding critical thinking about how such wars and attacks on sovereignty were allowed to happen on Arab soil in the first place. How could atrocities against one’s own blood go so far, and still continue? One must ask: If they managed to divide nations into countries, then what comes next?

Looking at Iraq today: a country divided into zones, authorized by religious and tribal lines. What once was Arab territory became partitioned by Sykes-Picot, the same division that allowed the colonization of Palestine, and later, further divided internally along tribal lines. Nowadays, Iraqis, like Lebanese and Syrians, must identify not only by nationality but also by religion to determine which tribe they belong to. As if one can belong to the wrong tribe, and such so, you can find yourself killed.

But we must understand how this division operated in practice. In Europe, after the French Revolution, nations fought each other over borders, identities, and power. To contain these conflicts, European powers established the modern nation-state system: fixed borders, national identities, citizenship tied to territory. This system emerged from European civil wars, from populations already divided and fighting.

Then Europe carried this logic to the Levant, but with a particular ambition in the background: Zionism. When Sykes and Picot carved up the region in 1916, their design was meant to enable the colonization of Palestine. The British created Iraq in 1920, enforced religious identification on official documents, appointed leaders through sectarian calculations, and distributed power along communal lines. The French did the same in Syria and Lebanon. They imposed the nation-state model on populations that were not at war with each other, dividing communities that had coexisted for centuries. These were not ancient hatreds but modern divisions, constructed through census categories, identity cards, and the patronage networks that rewarded sectarian loyalty, all to make colonial governance easier and Zionist settlement possible.

And when we say the British “created” Iraq, it is not to deny that Iraqis existed before, but to expose the logic of colonial fabrication, a logic Zionists later used against Palestinians, claiming that because there was no “official” Palestinian state by their definition of a state before British or Ottoman rule, the people, the Palestinians themselves, had no claim to the land or merely just did not exist. As if the state precedes the people, and not the other way around.

Why is the US to blame here? The answer is simple. The divide-and-conquer strategy, an inherited practice of imperial administration, one perfected across centuries from British India to French Africa to American interventions in Latin America. Why would the US want that? Control over oil and influence over global capitalism.

After the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, then US President Jimmy Carter announced that any attempt to control the Persian Gulf would be considered an assault on US vital interests, justifying military response. Implicitly, oil was a US strategic interest, and threats to its flow were treated as threats to the United States. Carter made this explicit in his 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” In this sense, the reserves and sovereignty of one country can be quickly seized by another, thousands of miles away, under no legitimate right, and certainly without the consent of the real owners and inhabitants.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was initially useful during the Iran-Iraq War, but became expendable once he threatened US regional dominance. What followed the 1991 Gulf War was a different kind of warfare: comprehensive sanctions that lasted over a decade, targeting not the regime but the Iraqi people themselves. The sanctions regime destroyed healthcare systems, contaminated water supplies, and caused mass child mortality, which UN officials on the ground called genocidal in effect. When confronted in 1996 about whether half a million dead Iraqi children were an acceptable cost, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s reply was chilling in its clarity: “We think the price is worth it.” Here, we can see the imperial calculation made explicit, Iraqi lives measured against American strategic interests and found worthless. The 2003 invasion extended this logic, moving from slow strangulation achieved by sanctions to direct occupation and military occupation. The Carter Doctrine continues to structure American policy in the region, translating resource extraction into the language of security and freedom. Whose security, whose freedom? Certainly not the Iraqis, whose existence was made subordinate if not irrelevant to the functioning of the American empire.

If Iraq taught us anything, it is that the destruction of a country is never only about that country. Looking at Syria and Palestine. The logic is the same, as the destruction rains down, turning cities to rubble, yet we’re fed this mindset that these are “civil wars” or “isolated conflicts,” tragedies that begin and end only within their own borders. If we’ve learned to see each other through the lens of division—nation over people, tribe over community, Sunni over Shia, Christian over Muslim—it’s not because our histories made it inevitable. It’s because an entire system was built to make these divisions feel natural. Borders were drawn, identities hardened, loyalties fragmented. The result is a region where solidarity is rare, and outrage is selective—where the suffering of one’s “own” is met with grief, but the destruction of neighbors is met with silence.

But empire doesn’t just divide. It destroys. Not only lives but the very conditions that make life possible. Not only bodies but the social bonds that sustain meaning, culture, continuity. This destruction has a name. And understanding it clearly is the first step in resisting it. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. As Azmi Bishara argues in The War on Gaza: Politics, Ethics, and International Law, what matters is intent, not numbers. Whether one person dies or a million, if the motive is to eliminate people based on their identity, it qualifies as genocide. The Convention outlines five categories: (a) killing group members; (b) inflicting serious physical or psychological harm; (c) imposing conditions designed to destroy the group; (d) preventing births; (e) forcibly removing children. Crucially, genocide extends beyond direct killing to include creating conditions meant to bring about a group’s destruction. What unfolds before us is also sociocide. By definition, it is a strategic annihilation of the structures that make collective life possible. It goes hand in hand with genocide: Where genocide targets the people themselves, sociocide destroys their ability to exist as a society by stripping people of the means to sustain life, envision futures, or exist as anything beyond isolated survivors.

The architecture of sociocide reveals itself most clearly in the weapon of comprehensive sanctions, a form of violence so gradual it escapes the category of war, yet so devastating it achieves what bombs alone cannot. The logic that governed Iraq’s sanctions extends through Gaza’s blockade, now stretching beyond seventeen years. Even before October 2023, the numbers told the story: unemployment at 45 percent, water contamination at 95 percent, and electricity available only four to six hours each day. This wasn’t the randomness of conflict but the methodical application of controlled deprivation. Israel regulates every calorie entering Gaza, every medical item, every building material. The blockade does more than limit movement. It engineers malnutrition, portions out survival, and maintains conditions where a population can subsist but never flourish.

Both cases reveal sanctions as sociocide’s primary instrument: the deliberate strangulation of economic life, the prevention of social reproduction, the rendering of entire populations into mere biological existence stripped of political possibility. What Iraq taught the empire, Gaza perfects. The same international “law” that permitted Iraq’s destruction now frames Gaza’s siege as a security measure rather than a crime. And the same Arab nationalist frameworks that atomized our response to Iraq, “not our country, not our concern,” now repeat in the face of Gaza’s annihilation. Iraq, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank: sharing the same architecture of destruction. Sociocide weakens societies, genocide erases them. The empire doesn’t need to eliminate populations when it can dismantle the structures that make collective life possible—and when those structures collapse, the population follows.

As the ceasefire came, so did collective amnesia. Gaza vanished from our feeds, our conversations, our conscience. No sustained demands to lift the seventeen-year blockade or dismantle the siege strangling two million people. The urgency died with the spectacle, revealing the truth: our attention was never about liberation, only our discomfort with witnessing destruction. What may be most alarming, though, is the ease with which ordinary individuals, not just governments, mentally detach from those enduring systematic oppression. Even people connected by lineage or shared identity learn to turn away, accept the situation as inevitable, and adopt “What can we do?” as their shield. So let’s answer it: What can we really do? And more importantly, what are we willing to do when we stop pretending powerlessness is truth?

To see empire for what it is requires recognizing how it operates across multiple scales simultaneously: through international institutions like the UN Security Council, through military alliances, through economic sanctions and debt structures, through media representations that determine whose suffering is deemed worthy of attention. But it also requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: Empire operates not just against us but through us. How we have internalized its logic and policed its limitations ourselves. This is not passive victimhood but active complicity—and therefore, our responsibility. Through the conditioning of the Arab collective to think of one’s own nation first, through deep patriotism that blinds us to shared struggles, through borders drawn by colonial powers that we now police ourselves.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq cannot be separated from the 1979 Carter Doctrine, the 1953 CIA coup in Iran, or the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to the 1948 establishment of Israel. Each intervention builds upon the infrastructure of previous ones, a cumulative architecture of domination spanning more than a century. And in its essence, this architecture survives not just through military force but through the fragmentation of collective consciousness, through teaching us to see each other as separate nations, even within the same “country” rather than as people under the same system of control.

Even while writing this, a certain guilt rises. How can we reduce so much human death, so much suffering, to lessons and patterns? Yet we must. To save the next life, the next child, the next nation. To see the empire for what it is and refuse its lies. To recognize how US imperialism wields our own resources, our own divisions, our own conditioned thinking against us. The question is no longer whether we see the pattern, but whether we can unlearn what the empire taught us to believe about ourselves.