We did whatever it took, including jeopardizing our own troops, to show how selfless we could be in Iraq. We allowed Hussein to make Americans feel responsible for the deaths caused by his own evil. We let ourselves be neutralized by his saying, in effect: ‘My soldiers will fire at you to preserve my dictatorship, and if you fire back, I will make sure that Iraqi civilians are killed.’ After Hussein’s government was toppled, we refrained from disarming a prominent cleric’s private militia, even after it had fatally attacked American troops; we did not want to anger the Shiites. We allowed gun-toting Hussein-supporters to incite crowds to take up arms against Americans–an act that would be a crime if committed on a peaceful street in the U.S.A.–in the middle of a war in Iraq; we did not want to displease the Sunnis. We did nothing to stop Syria from permitting Baathist and jihadist killers to cross its borders to fight Americans in Iraq; we did not want to upset any other Arab nations.
– Peter Schwartz, The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America