This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchler.

The Iraq War, 20 years later, lessons learned.

The lessons are enough for the rest of the century.

A new book, a stranger in your own city, travels in the Middle East, long war, long war,

emphasis.

The writer, Iyth Abdul Ahad, is the author of Photojournalist Now, and I look to talk

to him in the near future, but I've got two journalists with me who are also people

who have followed the Afghanistan war and the Iraq War very closely.

They happen simultaneously almost 20 years afterwards.

I welcome Ambassador Hussein Akhane, former ambassador to the United States from Pakistan,

now at the Hudson Institute, and Bill Raju of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy,

the Senior Fellow, keeping the long war journal.

Gentlemen, I summarize a very complex and well-told story by saying the US is not the major

player on the field.

The major player on the field is the violence, sectarian violence that was unleashed, not

by the US invasion, although that stirred it up again after the brutality of Saddam Hussein

for 35 years.

That was unleashed some time in the distant past, and the most vivid expression of it

in the book is when our author is five years old, and his father in the apartment they

occupy in Baghdad is father's well-employed, a teacher.

Holds him up in his arms and points to an F-4 phantom going overhead of Baghdad, saying,

...