Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism. By Toby Dodge. Routledge; 216 pages; $26.95. Buy from Amazon.com

FOR the first few years of this century Iraq loomed bright in the media. Journalists swarmed the country when America invaded in March 2003, staying to chronicle in painful detail the long, slow bleed of (mostly) Iraqi lives and of (mostly) American treasure and political capital that were lost in its wake. But between the country’s further slump into a grisly civil war in 2006 and 2007, and America’s hushed exit in December 2011, that sharp focus turned fuzzy. The story had become befuddling, too tragic and seemingly too complicated to comprehend—and, for many Americans, shameful.

Iraq was Chinatown, an unknowable entity where it was unwise to linger. As a result, contemporary Iraq, a very different creation from what America’s occupation had intended, has been poorly chronicled. The best recent books in English have been military histories, aimed at showing how America’s generals performed. Few have explained what happened to Iraq itself.

Toby Dodge, who teaches at the London School of Economics, does much to fill that gap in his new book, published under the auspices of the nearby International Institute for Strategic Studies. It is a short academic work and makes no effort to present the human side of a generally bleak picture. But Mr Dodge is clear, concise and unsparing about the country’s ongoing agony. For anyone who wants to know how Iraq arrived at its current state, and wonders what might happen next, this is an excellent place to begin.

For a start, Mr Dodge puts quickly to rest the notion that Iraq’s unique ethnic and sectarian mix—about 60% Shia Muslim, 20% Sunni Muslim and 15% Kurdish, along with many smaller minorities—predestined the country to strife. He argues persuasively that the underlying cause of the bloodletting, which still continues on a reduced scale, was the collapse of the Iraqi state. This created the social stress and acceptance of violence that allowed what he calls “ethnic entrepreneurs”—political manipulators of sectarians fears—to flourish. It also took away the brakes and levers of government control.

The decline of the Iraqi state began in the 1990s, when UN sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime reduced its capacity to deliver services, and when the Kurdish northern region slipped entirely from its control. Post-invasion, misguided American policies accelerated the rot. The Pentagon’s insistence on keeping troop numbers low left the occupiers too few men to stop the looting of 17 out of 23 ministries in the Iraqi capital. The order to disband the Iraqi army put 400,000 armed and jobless men onto Iraq’s streets, at the same time removing a potential counterforce to both internal criminality and meddling by Iraq’s neighbours. A vast purge of members of Saddam’s ubiquitous Baath party, combined with the empowerment of parvenu politicians who packed ministerial fiefs with loyalists under an American-endorsed system of sectarian spoils, further stripped state institutions of competence.

Such follies are fairly well known. Mr Dodge proves more enlightening in unpicking the subsequent evolution of Iraqi politics. The occupation gave birth to an “exclusive elite bargain”: a political structure built by and for the interest of a select group of players, to the detriment of outsiders and the public at large. The constitution promulgated under American auspices in 2005 reflected the rise of Shia and Kurdish parties in the new order. It ignored and even demonised the concerns of Iraq’s hitherto dominant Sunni minority.

The resulting rough, majoritarian version of democracy has proved chronically unstable, but has also created opportunities to be exploited. Violent, radically sectarian groups used suicide-bombs and tit-for-tat atrocities to pitch Iraq into full-scale civil war under the hapless noses of America’s troops. Ruthless politicians, most notably Iraq’s now two-term prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, also benefited.

A second-tier bureaucrat in the Dawa party, a Shia Islamist group that had been viciously hounded into exile by Saddam, Mr Maliki was ushered into the party leadership in 2005 by various other powerful factions, who all assumed he was a lightweight. Mr Dodge skilfully outlines the prime minister’s unexpected rise to pre-eminence as he outfoxed and overcame opponents, including the Americans, at every turn.

It is a tale worthy of Shakespeare, and its conclusion remains to be written. In Mr Dodge’s assessment, Mr Maliki has made himself indispensable to too many powerful people, and controls enough of the nearly 1m armed men now on the state’s payroll to be unseated any time soon. The future for Iraq itself looks less assured, despite the growing inflow of oil money.

Sunni parts of the country are currently in a state of insurrection, and the now prosperous and peaceful, if politically authoritarian, Kurdish north looks closer than ever to seceding. The turmoil in neighbouring Syria, where sectarian tensions starkly mirror those flaring up in Iraq (on an even more destructive scale), is spreading its poison insidiously across the region. In Iraq something may once again have to give.