Iraq was going to confront me with a question far more troubling than that of war. A war can destroy a state. But what happens when, in destroying that state, you unleash all the fractures it contained? This question is physically inscribed within the Abode of Chaos. I can walk among the works and find almost the entire Iraqi sequence.

Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell.

The architecture of Halliburton. Representations of the oil war. Military carcasses.

The helicopter crashed.

The Land Rover.

The Hummer.

The steel structures that look like they came from a train that had broken down in the middle of the desert. And this work that I have always regarded as a kind of primitive cartography of contemporary Mesopotamia: Between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Two rivers. One civilization. And in the middle, a state whose modern borders had confined peoples, faiths, histories, and interests that never formed as homogeneous a whole as the map might suggest. The political map is always dangerous when one forgets what it represents. A border draws a line. It does not reveal loyalties.

Tribes. Languages. Religions. Holy cities.

Trade networks. Memories of massacres. Past dominations. Humiliations.

Families. Alliances. Hatreds.

Iraq was all of that at once. The country that the United States invaded in 2003 was therefore not a bloc that could be broken and then rebuilt like a machine. It was an authoritarian equilibrium. Terrible. Violent. But an equilibrium nonetheless.

Saddam Hussein had built his power by maintaining under brutal domination forces which, if brutally freed, would immediately begin working against each other again.

This is obviously not a defense of his dictatorship. It is exactly the opposite.

Understanding a system never means justifying it. That's a rule I adhere to. A dictatorship can be criminal and simultaneously fulfill a structural function in maintaining the balance of power in a territory. Eliminating it doesn't automatically eliminate the forces it contained. It can unleash them. That's precisely what was going to happen.

For years, I had observed Iraq primarily through the lens of another conflict: the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988. Eight years of brutality difficult to comprehend today. Hundreds of thousands dead. Ground offensives. Bombed cities. Chemical weapons. Minefields. Teenagers sent to the front lines.

And always that region of Basra, in the south, which reappeared as a hub. Basra is never just a city. It is a gateway.

A port. An opening to the Gulf.

A close relationship with Iran.

A Shiite area.

A petroleum geography.

A point where territory, religion, energy, and empire converge. I knew, therefore, well before 2003, that Iraq could not be viewed solely from Baghdad. Basra had to be considered.

Kurdistan. Najaf. Sunni areas.

The borders with Iran.

Turkey. Syria. Saudi Arabia. Kuwait.

A country never exists in isolation. It exists within the tensions of its neighbors. Yet the American invasion of March 2003 was presented with an almost cinematic simplicity.

A dictator. Weapons of mass destruction.

A threat. An intervention.

The fall of the regime. Then democracy.

This sequence possessed all the qualities of a story. It had a villain. A sense of urgency. A moral justification. An overwhelming military force. And a conclusion already written before History even began. That's precisely what worried me. When reality seems to fit the script too perfectly, I always look for the blind spot.

There was that now-iconic image: Colin Powell before the United Nations Security Council. Then there was that small, illustrative vial, used to materialize the scale of the threat he was discussing. It obviously didn't contain the biological agent Powell was talking about. Yet, the object gave visual form to an argument about the invisible. This is where the image becomes a political weapon: the viewer no longer sees just a man speaking, but something that could kill.

This scene has always fascinated me because it reveals so much about the modern manufacturing of consent. Evidence must become image. Even when the evidence is questionable, its representation already possesses an independent power. Months and years later, the weapons of mass destruction that were announced would not be found in the same form as they had been presented. But in the meantime, the war would have taken place. This is a terrible asymmetry. An image can contribute to starting a war in a matter of minutes. Historical correction will take years.

This question of proof, I will find it everywhere. In information. In the Art Market. In photography. In artificial intelligence.

Who produced the document?

From what source?

According to which validation chain?

What do we really know?

And most importantly:

What do we want to believe?

In 2003, a segment of the American political establishment already desired this war. Therefore, it is not enough to study the intelligence itself. One must examine the intellectual framework within which this intelligence is situated.

Dick Cheney.

Donald Rumsfeld.

Paul Wolfowitz.

The neoconservatives. The debates surrounding the Project for the New American Century. And, further back in the intellectual genealogy, Leo Strauss, whom I consider one of the philosophical foundations of a segment of American neoconservatism. His thought permeated, directly or through his students and their intellectual heirs, certain circles that would come to be influential in George W. Bush's America. I am obviously not claiming to establish a simple causal chain between Strauss and the invasion of Iraq: a philosophy does not trigger a war. But it can contribute to shaping the intellectual framework within which certain leaders conceive of democracy, power, political regimes, truth, and strategic necessity. It is in this capacity that Strauss, in my view, belongs to the genealogy of this moment.

I am not reducing the invasion of Iraq to a philosophy. That would be absurd.

The causes are multiple: September 11, American security, the Middle East transformation project, the doctrine of preventive war, military power, energy issues, regional power dynamics, domestic politics, erroneous representations of the regime and industrial interests.

All of this forms a rhizome. That's exactly how I look at geopolitics at the Abode of Chaos. I'm not looking for a single cause. A single cause is almost always laziness. I'm looking for the lines that intersect. And among them, of course, was energy.

Oil doesn't explain everything. But to claim that it explains nothing would be just as ridiculous. I was then watching very closely the debate on peak oil—this idea that global conventional oil production would eventually reach a maximum before entering a phase of structural decline.

The energy question had something almost metaphysical about it in the 2000s. The entire industrial civilization depended on a material that came from an immense geological time and was consumed at a historically insane speed.

Iraq possessed gigantic reserves. It was located at the center of this energy geography. Around it, the infrastructure, the contracts, the majors, the service companies and the strategic interests formed a second territory, invisible on the political maps.

Halliburton then became a name impossible to ignore. And with Halliburton came Dick Cheney, the company's former executive who became Vice President of the United States. I'm wary of oversimplification. Cheney didn't invade Iraq "because he came from Halliburton." Reality never works that simply. But when politicians, the defense industry, energy, reconstruction, and big business intersect, it would be equally childish to refuse to examine their relationships.

Geopolitics is precisely the study of these relationships. A state never acts in an economic vacuum. War immediately creates markets.

Logistics. Transport. Security. Reconstruction. Infrastructure. Oil. Telecommunications. Supply. Military bases.

Mass destruction inevitably creates a massive reconstruction economy. This doesn't prove that the economy caused the war. It shows that war immediately redistributes interests. The Abode of Chaos has always tried to make these connections visible. That's why I could have Bush, Bin Laden, Halliburton, military wrecks, oil, the dollar, maps, and portraits coexist in the same space.

It wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was the exact opposite. Conspiracy theories simplify. They imagine a closed room where a few men decide everything. Real power is much more complex.

It is made up of structures, institutions, converging interests, doctrines, opportunities, errors, bureaucracies, rivalries, and partial information.

And sometimes, individuals convinced they understand the world when they only see a fragment of it. The invasion itself was militarily swift. The regime collapses. Images of Saddam Hussein's statue toppled in Baghdad circulate around the globe. Once again, an image provides the world with a conclusion. The dictator falls. The war seems won. But the real war begins precisely the moment the statue hits the ground.

The divide existed before. But certain decisions transformed it into a political and military system. The dissolution of the Iraqi army was one of them. The Baathification policy, aimed at eliminating the influence of the Baath Party, was another. The desire to destroy Saddam Hussein's apparatus was understandable. But this simultaneously destroyed a part of the country's administrative and military structure.

Hundreds of thousands of men suddenly found themselves without a job. Among them were soldiers. Officers. Trained men. Armed or perfectly skilled in the use of weapons. With networks. Knowledge of the terrain. And often immense humiliation. What happens when you simultaneously strip men of their salary, their status, their institutional affiliation, and their place in the new political order?

Democrats are not automatically produced. An insurrection can be produced. This is where the Iraq War becomes, for me, an almost experimental case of the geopolitics of consequence. A decision made to dismantle the old power can create part of the force that will fight the new one.

That is why I look at politics less from the perspective of its proclaimed intentions than from that of its consequences. An intention can be sincere, sometimes even defended as noble, and yet still produce a catastrophe. In my analysis, therefore, consequences must remain as important as intentions.

The Ba'athist system had given disproportionate power to certain Sunni networks in a country where the majority of the population is Shiite. When the regime fell, the country's political representation changed. The Shiite majority was able to access power from which it had been largely excluded. On paper, this resembled a democratic correction.

In reality, this rebalancing is occurring amidst occupation, state dissolution, and escalating violence. It is therefore immediately interpreted by many Sunnis as a dispossession. The democratic process is simultaneously becoming a sectarian one.

And then Iran appeared. This is one of the most extraordinary paradoxes of the American invasion. The United States considered the Islamic Republic of Iran a major strategic adversary. But by destroying Saddam Hussein, they eliminated precisely one of Tehran's main regional counterweights. The man who had waged war against Iran for eight years was gone. The Iraqi Shiite majority regained political power.

Parties, religious networks, and figures who had lived in Iran or maintained ties with it were returning to the heart of the system. The American invasion thus altered the regional balance, partially benefiting the Iranian adversary.

This is a near-perfect example of a blind spot. You act against one threat and you strengthen another power that you are also trying to contain. The real world resists binary scenarios. In Baghdad and Sunni areas, the insurgency is growing.

Then came Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With him, the rift took on a new dimension. It was no longer just a matter of fighting the American occupation. It was about provoking sectarian war.

Attack the Shiites.

Attack their holy places.

To make cohabitation impossible.

To produce enough deaths so that each community begins to see the other as an existential threat. Terror then becomes a technique of social engineering. It's not just those who are present who are killed; it's killed to modify the behavior of those who remain. This is perhaps the most stark definition of terrorism.

An attack always targets a much larger population than its direct victims. It manufactures fear. Then fear manufactures decisions. And these decisions sometimes produce exactly the polarization sought by the terrorists.

Al-Qaeda's strategy in Iraq was specifically aimed at fueling sectarian warfare. The 2006 attack on the Shiite shrine of al-Askari in Samarra became one of the catalysts for this dynamic. From then on, the line between war against the occupation, civil war, militias, organized crime, sectarian revenge, and international jihad became increasingly difficult to define.

Chaos breeds its own entrepreneurs. It is in this fertile ground that the genealogy of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and much later that of Daesh, becomes intelligible. Here again, we must resist the temptation to believe that Daesh suddenly appeared in 2014. No organization of this power appears suddenly.

It has genealogies. Former officers. Jihadist networks. Prisons. Doctrines. Humiliations. Funding. Roads. Porous borders. War experiences. A bureaucracy.

The monster always has a childhood. Post-2003 Iraq is part of that childhood. Among the images that struck me most, Abu Ghraib is obviously one of them. There again, the image transcended all doctrines. One could explain democracy, human rights, the liberation of the Iraqi people. And then these photographs appeared.

The photographs showed naked, humiliated, piled-up prisoners, submissive bodies, while soldiers posed in front of them.

And that hooded figure, standing on a crate, arms outstretched, wires strapped to his body. A few photographs could destroy thousands of pages of political rhetoric. Because bodies don't lie the way words do. The West was brutally confronted with its own contradiction. A war presented, among other things, as a liberation, produced images of torture and humiliation.

I am obviously not reducing the entire American military to Abu Ghraib. That would be intellectually reprehensible. But a democratic institution must also be judged by how it addresses its own crimes when they come to light. This is what distinguishes it from a regime that denies them on principle. Abu Ghraib became a global symbol because it directly addressed this gap between words and deeds. I have always viewed it as one of the great lessons of the 21st century on the power of images. A state can control a territory. It no longer necessarily controls the images that emerge from that territory.

A digital camera becomes a geopolitical power. A few files can circulate across the globe and alter the perception of a war. This transformation would become central to The Abode of Chaos. We understood with 9/11 that the image could become the event. Iraq showed that it could also become the trial of the event.

Then Saddam Hussein was captured. The image, again. The former dictator, whom we had seen for decades in uniform, appears bearded, haggard, being examined by a military doctor. Power also produces an iconography of decay.

Then the trial.

Then came the conviction.

Then the hanging.

I remember the shock caused by the images of his execution. I felt no sympathy for Saddam Hussein. His regime had committed massive crimes.

Repression. The Kurds. Halabja. The Shiites. The opposition. The wars.

But a political execution is never a neutral image. It legally seals a body. It does not erase the system that produced it. And it can transform a former dictator into a symbol for those who feel defeated along with him. Death does not always resolve memory. It can radicalize it.

There was, in particular, the Kurdish question. Yet another fracture that the Iraqi map had contained without resolving it. The Kurds had been victims of Ba'athist repression and the Anfal campaigns. After 2003, Iraqi Kurdistan consolidated considerable autonomy. Here again, a democratic dynamic simultaneously created a new geopolitical question. Because an autonomous Kurdistan in Iraq is never solely about Iraq.

It concerns Turkey, Iran, and Syria.

The various Kurdish populations of the region. Each piece of the map interacts with the others. That's why I've always refused to look at the Middle East country by country. State divisions are necessary for international law. They aren't enough to understand the people.

Then there was Moqtada al-Sadr. His name seemed to me to almost encapsulate the complexity of the new Iraq. A young Shiite cleric. A family deeply scarred by the assassinations under Saddam Hussein.

A grassroots network. A militia.

The Mahdi Army.

Immense social power in the poor neighborhoods of Baghdad.

Sadr City.

And simultaneously, a complex relationship with Iran. Sectarian proximity never implies automatic political submission. This is precisely what many Westerners struggle to grasp when they view Shiism as a monolithic entity. There is no single political Shiism.

There are schools. Authorities. Nationalisms. Traditions. Rivalries. Interests. Lineages.

Different conceptions of the relationship between religion and the state. And this is where Najaf and Qom come in. I have sometimes spoken of the war between the two Vaticans. The expression is deliberately provocative and imperfect, but it immediately allows us to understand part of the structure.

Qom in Iran.

Najaf in Iraq.

Two major centers of knowledge and authority within Shiism. Two histories. Two political environments.

Two possible relationships to power. In Qom, the legacy of the Islamic Republic and the velayat-e faqih, the rule of the jurist, profoundly structures the relationship between religion and state. In Najaf, the tradition, notably embodied by the authority of Ali al-Sistani, is rooted in a different conception, more cautious regarding the direct exercise of political power by the clergy.

This distinction appears theological. It is geopolitical. An idea about the place of religion becomes an architecture of power. And when tens of millions of people recognize religious authorities whose networks cross borders, theology becomes geography. This is precisely what The Abode of Chaos attempts to demonstrate.

A portrait is never just a face. Behind the face, there is a network. Behind the network, a story. Behind the story, an intellectual framework. And behind the framework, sometimes territorial divisions that the official map doesn't show.

That's why I couldn't paint Bush without Bin Laden.

Neither Saddam nor Iran.

Nor Iraq without Najaf.

Nor Najaf without Qom.

Nor Basra without looking at the Gulf. Each work calls forth another. The visitor sometimes thinks they see an accumulation. I see a graph. The Abode of Chaos has always functioned this way. It materializes relationships.

A military sculpture placed a few meters from a political portrait is not a coincidence. A carcass is not just a carcass.

The helicopter crashed.

The Land Rover.

The Hummer.

These objects bring the war into a village in the Monts d’Or. They strip the conflict of the comfortable distance afforded by the screen. A military vehicle on television belongs to another world. The same material vocabulary in the midst of your everyday space produces a different sensation. War ceases to be an exotic image. It enters the territory.

I think that's what interested me in this accumulation of military material.

Not celebrating the army.

Even less so, playing war games.

On the contrary. To reveal the physical weight of what strategic maps reduce to symbols. On a map, a vehicle is a small icon. In reality, it's tons of metal.

Fuel. People. Logistics. Industry. Contracts. Spare parts. Roads.

A global production chain. Modern warfare is an industry before it is a heroic narrative. And Iraq demonstrated this with perfect brutality. An army capable of overthrowing a regime in a matter of weeks could be incapable of rebuilding a stable political order for years. That is another essential lesson.

Military superiority is not political superiority. One can win the battle and lose the aftermath. Firepower destroys. It does not automatically create legitimacy. Democracy itself cannot be transported like a piece of equipment.

It requires institutions, compromises, trust, practices, and a history.

A story. Citizens who accept losing an election without taking up arms. Minorities who believe they will remain protected. Majorities who accept not taking everything. All of this doesn't just fall from the sky after a statue topples.

That's why the title "Iraq: Manufacturing a Fracture" doesn't mean that the Americans fabricated Iraq's divisions. That would be historically inaccurate. The divisions were long-standing.

Arabs and Kurds. Sunnis and Shiites. Tribes. Regions. Cities. Social classes.

Ottoman history. British Mandate. Monarchy. Republics. Ba'athism.

Wars. Embargo. Repression.

All of this existed. But a fracture can exist without escalating into a general war. Certain political decisions can widen it. Make it institutionalized. Arm it. Transform it into a primary identity. At that point, one is no longer simply discovering a fracture. One is participating in its creation.

It is this distinction that interests me. There are always lines of weakness in History. Intelligent policy sometimes attempts to contain them. Blind policy can transform them into vulnerabilities. And once the vulnerabilities are exposed, no one fully controls what emerges from them.

The United States will discover this reality.

Iran will use it. Iraqi parties will use it. Militias will use it. Al-Qaeda will use it.

Then came Daesh. Each actor entered the rift with their own strategy. And the rift ended up becoming an autonomous system. That's exactly what Chaos means to me when it's misunderstood. Chaos isn't absolute disorder. Real Chaos produces structures.

Attractors. Repetitions.

Forms emerge. Post-2003 Iraq is almost a tragic laboratory for this dynamic. An order is destroyed. A free space is believed to have been created. The space immediately reorganizes itself. But not according to the destroyer's plan. This is one of the world's fundamental laws. One never eliminates a structure without creating the conditions for another.

Here I find an intuition that runs throughout my journey. In a complex system, action never produces only the desired effect. It modifies relationships. And relationships, in turn, produce consequences that no one had written into the initial scenario.

Iraq has produced a strengthened Iran. Strengthened militias. A more rigid sectarian identity. A generation of fighters. A new war economy. Jihadist networks.

Prisons became meeting places for future leaders. Then, a few years later, the Syrian collapse offered these networks another territory. The Iraq-Syria border became almost abstract for a time. Daesh was able to proclaim the symbolic disappearance of the Sykes-Picot borders. Once again, ancient History resurfaced just when we thought we were building a new order.

I therefore view the work Between the Tigris and the Euphrates differently today than when it was conceived. This is one of the characteristics of the Abode of Chaos. Works continue to produce meaning because History continues. A geopolitical work is never truly finished. It retrospectively acquires new layers.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers were there before Saddam.

Before Bush.

Before modern Iraq.

Before the current borders.

They will likely still be there after the political configurations we know. This geographical permanence puts the ambitions of empires into perspective in an almost dizzying way. A president believes he is transforming the Middle East. A dictator believes he is building an eternal regime. An army believes it is establishing a new order. Then the men disappear. The rivers remain.

I believe this idea has always protected me from a certain fascination with the powerful. I paint their portraits. I bring them into the Abode of Chaos. I look at them. I analyze them. But I know they pass away.

Bush passes.

Saddam passes.

Bin Laden passes.

Cheney passes.

Doctrines come and go. Matter, geographies, and memories endure longer. Therefore, there are no heroic portraits in the Abode of Chaos. A political portrait is a provisional record of power. The face that commands today will become tomorrow just one layer among many.

This is precisely why Bush and Bin Laden could find themselves in the same artistic territory. Not because they were morally equivalent. They weren't. But because they belonged to the same historical system. 9/11 produced the war on terror. The war on terror produced Afghanistan and then contributed to the context that led to Iraq.

Iraq is producing new divisions.

These divisions give rise to new organizations.

Organizations produce new wars. The enemy and the one who fights him end up belonging to the same historical rhizome. This is perhaps one of the most difficult things to grasp.

Two absolute adversaries can become mutually constitutive. Each justifies part of the other’s existence.

Terrorism strengthens security apparatuses. Security apparatuses fuel certain narratives of persecution. War produces new combatants.

New combatants justify new wars. The system can become self-perpetuating. We understand nothing if we only consider the moral intentions of each individual. We must look at the loop. That is what I constantly seek at the Abode of Chaos. The loops.

The feedback.

The consequences.

Things that appear where no one expected them. Iraq is one of the great warnings of the early 21st century. It shows that a superpower can possess the best satellites, the best weapons, vast intelligence services, unparalleled economic power, and yet fail to see a crucial part of the system it is about to change. Iraq leads me to a hypothesis: power does not necessarily eliminate the blind spot; it can sometimes amplify it. The more considerable a power's resources, the greater the risk of confusing the sophistication of its model with its ability to describe reality. That is where I see the danger. I am wary of any thought that never encounters resistance.

Whether it be political, religious, technological, or artistic.

Or today, algorithmic. I fear that from the moment the model becomes more important than reality, we will end up making reality pay for its refusal to conform.

Iraq paid. The Americans paid. The Shiites paid. The Sunnis paid. The Kurds paid. The Christians of Iraq paid.

The Yazidis will pay the price later in the expansion of Daesh. The entire region will pay. And several generations will likely continue to live with the consequences of decisions made in a few offices at the beginning of the century. That's what strikes me when I walk through the Abode of Chaos today.

Objects are immobile. But the consequences they represent continue to circulate. Steel rusts. Portraits age. Names gradually disappear from newspapers. But the structures remain.

I look at Saddam. Then I look at Iran.

I watch Bush. Then Daesh.

I look at Basra. Then at the oil.

I look at Najaf. Then Qom.

And I suddenly realize that what we called a war was actually a gigantic redistribution of power. That's why the next chapter couldn't leave Iraq immediately.

We needed to go deeper. To descend beneath Baghdad. Beneath the armies.

Under the governments. Go to places where an authority can be almost invisible from the West and yet guide millions of human beings. We had to look at the holy cities.

Religious schools. Lineages. Networks.

The rivalries within Shiism. Because beneath the visible war lay another geography. Older. Slower. And perhaps, in the long run, more powerful.

Najaf. Qom. Basra.

The war had shifted the boundaries of power. Now it was necessary to learn to see those that did not appear on any map.