Contemplate, if you will, the agony of Iraq today. Soldiers of the regular army and the Republican Guard dropped their weapons and abandoned their positions, opting not to defend the nation; the political leadership went underground, fleeing to places unknown; and the top bureaucrats of the ruling party took a powder.

And these folks left Iraq’s urban centers, including the capital city, to looters who not only stripped palaces of their finery, hospitals of their medical equipment, and government buildings of their office supplies, but ended up cannibalizing their own heritage when they rampaged through the 70-year old National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, one of the greatest repositories of Iraqi culture, smashing or walking off with hundreds of priceless artifacts and irreplaceable treasures, including Sumerian clay pots, Assyrian marble carvings, Babylonian statues and intricate manuscripts from the Abbasside era.

Why have we evinced such historical impotence in the face of an invading army committed to introducing, at gunpoint, “regime change” in our part of the world? Why have Iraqis, a people we had been assured were a cultivated community, descended to chaos?

It will take many books, covering an immense range of subjects, to understand the dizzying collapse of Iraq. For now, I proffer two words: Political culture. I speak of a political culture that left the Iraqi people, after decades of repressive rule, too sapped of national elan, too exhausted to fight back, too indifferent to their fate.

It pays to review the devastating legacy — the damage report, as it were — of a regime that derived its legitimacy, to quote Mikhael Gorbachev’s rueful observation on the collapse of the Soviet Union, from “the legitimacy of the bayonet,” where political leaders had not the slightest scruple about deploying terror as a means of silencing dissent. Reportedly, Saddam Hussein, with cigar in mouth, would jot “shoot” or “shoot at once” on the margins of lists of political dissidents or disrespectful malcontents placed on his desk. Thousands of ordinary folk, along with the best and the brightest in society, were lost in the torture chambers and the great furnace of intermittent purges.

Everyday life for Iraqis was completely dominated by the regime’s ideological organs, which tailored facts and interpretations of political events to suit the current party line, drilling into the language a bent for saccharine pathos beneath which to conceal any amount of deception or denial of reality, an automatic reverence for the long word and loud voice, and a weakness for slogans and pompous cliches.

In effect, history was a branch of propaganda, and had nothing to do with what was actually happening. When the “Supreme Leader” told you that Iraq waged and then won “the Mother of All Battles” in 1991, citizens, socialized on the ethic of fear, believed it all. Iraq was progressively becoming a weak, broken-down culture at its core. And if you think this social condition is not sustainable over long periods of time, then consider the immensity of this leader’s personality cult: The ubiquitous statues, portraits, songs, and parades extolling the man’s heroic deeds and persona.

In this make-believe world, the average Iraqi, humiliated at his inability to gather his national being into some kind of inviolate order, was now losing the capacity to question this humiliation. He had been so stripped of his powers of self-determination, and his humanity so reduced to a fragment that he subconsciously dissociated himself from objective reality. For how else would you explain the collective outcry of Iraqis pledging, “With our soul, with our blood, we stand by you, Saddam”?

Decay is clearly built into this kind of political system, and the rot progressively eats away at it until it would take but a nudge, by an invading force, in this case, for it to collapse — and with it to emerge the implosive, self-destructive, long-suppressed rage of a people now tearing up the roots from which their history of civilization grew.

Saddam Hussein’s regime fizzled with the shameful image of his statues being so ignominiously toppled by foreign troops. Now it is left to the Iraqi people, after decades of absorbing a mass of that regime’s hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness, to pick up the pieces.

Let’s hope they learned a lesson from their modern history, because, sure as heck, these folks don’t need to repeat it.