In contrast to its establishment by the British in the early twentieth century, the second effort to establish an Iraqi state, made this century by the US, was chaotic and not based on a vision for how to build it.
There is an immense difference in scale between the two foundations. Iraq had not been a state but three provinces (Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra) of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, while it was a single country that had been around for 80 years and had the fifth or sixth largest army in the world when Saddam was toppled by the US in 2003.
