Politics & Power Quote by Jon Lee Anderson

Calling Iraq “a house built on a bad foundation” is Anderson’s way of stripping the post-2003 project of its official narrative sheen. He’s not talking about a single policy mistake or tactical blunder; he’s arguing that the entire structure of the occupation and the new political order was compromised at the moment of its birth. The metaphor matters because a house can be renovated, redecorated, even expanded, but if the foundation is cracked, every improvement sits on borrowed time.

The loaded verbs - “sacking, burning and plunder” - deliberately echo the lexicon of conquest, not liberation. Anderson is smuggling in a moral indictment: the Americans didn’t merely fail to prevent chaos; they “allowed” it, a word that implies choice, passivity, and responsibility. It also pries open a taboo in mainstream U.S. discourse from that period: that legitimacy isn’t just won by toppling a dictator, it’s lost in the first hours afterward, when ordinary people discover that the new power can’t or won’t protect them.

“For whatever reason” is a reporter’s scalpel. It’s dismissive without being partisan, suggesting that the bureaucratic explanations (insufficient troops, unclear orders, strategic restraint) may be factually true and still morally irrelevant. The subtext is corrosive: if your entry into a country is marked by permitted looting of its capital, you’ve taught everyone watching what your rule is worth. In that sense, Anderson isn’t predicting collapse so much as explaining why Iraq’s later fractures were structurally baked in.