Ali Allawi, former Iraqi cabinet member, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 

Over the past 30 years, the divisions within Islam have triggered paroxysms of violence. Sectarian, ethnic, and racial hatreds have trumped the ideal of Islamic unity. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and the internecine struggle that accompanied the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan, are a few such examples.

In post-Saddam Iraq, however, the full extent of the dissonance between Islamic political and religious life was laid bare. The murderous violence that was unleashed by radical Wahhabi-inspired Islamists was sanctioned with laborious jurisprudential "justifications" from leading religious figures. Saudi-based clerics applauded the egregious acts of violence and mayhem perpetrated by the Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, especially when they targeted the Shiites, a heretical group in Wahhabi demonology. Those rulings were accepted by many Muslims around the world, and they legitimated the slaughter of innocent civilians.

The brutal response of the Shiite militias that followed, a counterterror in its own right, focused on the Sunnis of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and millions displaced or exiled. The country descended into chaos and strife.

This eye-witness account by a Shiite Iraqi sounds nothing like the American and European liberal refrain that blamed America for all the death and brutality in Iraq.  The removal of Saddam gave Iraqis a choice.  What they and their co-religionists did with it is described above.