Chaos In Iraq: The Latest Evidence History Doesn't Follow America's Optimistic Script

U.S. NAVY recruiting poster, circa 1917-18. 
Woodrow Wilson hoped for a global democratic peace.

Alan: If George Bush and Dick Cheney had not waged their Whimsy War on Iraq, thus undermining a stable country that was a staunch ally of Ronald Reagan -- a country with no WMD and no involvement in 9/11 -- the current ISIS crisis would not exist. 

ISIS' seizure of Mosul and Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's hometown) would have been inconceivable --- like The Tea Party winning the Oval Office, both houses of Congress and packing the Supreme Court with nine judges all named Antonin Scalia.  

The prospect of a 9/11-type terror strike launched on the United States from Iraq or Syrian soil would have been unthinkable except in the delusional minds of paranoid xenophobes whose constituency (spearheaded by Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton) was solely responsible for kicking every hornet's nest in the Islamic world, then wondering why blowback was biting them in the ass.

If tables were turned, Americans would have already launched terror attacks across the Middle East. For that matter, the entire Iraq War -- from inception onward -- has been an unrelenting exercise in state-sponsored terrorism perpetrated by Uncle Sam.

During the run-up to The Iraq War, everyone with an internet connection and a folded cortex was aware that the invasion was monstrously stupid -- and grotesquely unjust.  (Pope Benedict XVI declared the war unjust. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/pope-benedict-xvi-questions-if-modern.html)

Remember "Shock and Awe?" Remember "The Power of Pride?" 

Who's shocked now? 

And what about the pride - which, predictably, came before the fall - and wasted all those lives? 

The dead, the maimed.

The Americans, the Iraqis?

 Since the Vietnam War, two lessons scream at us. 

"You don't get involved in somebody else's Civil War." 

"And you don't start them." 

When we forget either lesson, American soldiers come home in caskets having accomplished nothing. 

We owe our troops trustworthy guidance, not swashbuckle, bluster and simian chest-thumping.

Fear-driven Christians,  cheerleading the Apocaplypse,  are the most reprehensible actors in this whole sordid scenario.

They are America's Taliban.  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-newsroom-tea-party-is-americas.html

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"Terrorism And The Other Religions"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html

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Walter Russell Mead  June 13, 2014 

Wall Street Journal

It has not been a good year for the liberal world order. Not since the end of the Cold War have so many crises erupted in so many places: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's relentless push in the East and South China seas, and the surge in jihadist violence and terror from Boko Haram in Nigeria to the religious war that now engulfs Syria and Iraq. This is not what Americans thought the world would look like in the third decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

As we struggle to understand why the post-Cold War world has been such an unpleasant place, it is tempting to turn foreign policy into a political football. There are plenty of Democrats who think that everything would have been fine if President George W. Bush hadn't blundered into the Iraq war. There is also no shortage of Republicans who think that everything would have worked out fine if only Barack Obama hadn't made it to the White House.

While it is true that both presidents got some important things wrong, it is what unites them rather than what divides them that is the root cause of our troubles. Both Messrs. Bush and Obama, like many of their fellow citizens, radically underestimate the dangers and difficulties in the path of historical progress.

Americans tend to believe that history is easy and that things usually work out for the best. When the French Revolution began, many Americans followed Thomas Jefferson's lead in thinking that the overthrow of Louis XVI would lead rapidly to democracy in Europe. Before World War I, most Americans believed that another great European war was unthinkable; when that war ended, President Woodrow Wilson was sure that a global democratic peace was on the way.

In 1929, the U.S. Senate ratified the Kellogg-Briand Pact, supposedly outlawing war forever. In 1945, most Americans believed that the defeat of Germany and Japan would usher in a new era of permanent peace based on the wonderworking powers of the newly created United Nations and the goodwill of Joseph Stalin.

Our abiding if misguided trust in the historical process is a natural consequence of our own national experience. From the time of the early English settlements in the New World, Americans have had significantly higher living standards than just about anybody else on the planet. Our revolution against King George III led to a relatively mild war, and within a few years of its end, we had adopted a Constitution that has served us well for more than two centuries.

Our ascent to world power was, by historical standards, quite smooth. Neither World War I nor World War II cost as many American lives as our Civil War; Americans sacrificed less than our key allies in both global conflicts but benefited more from the outcome than anyone else.

This happy history shapes our thinking about the world more than most of us know. Whether conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, Americans tend to think that history doesn't matter much, that win-win solutions are easily found and that world history is moving inexorably toward a better and more peaceful place. The end of the 20th century strengthened that national faith. The amazing fall of the Soviet Union—when an evil, heavily armed empire collapsed without our firing a shot—and the subsequent surge in democratic governance from East Asia and Central Europe to Latin America persuaded Americans that history had turned an important corner.

Economically, the 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall were also unusually benign. Americans enjoyed the two longest economic expansions in our history from the presidency of Ronald Reagan through 2008, punctuated by only a mild recession when the tech bubble burst. With rapid growth in many developing countries, it looked as if our policy makers had solved the problem of economic management.

The holiday from history came to an end on 9/11, but the Bush administration's subsequent approach to Iraq and the Middle East dramatically underestimated the difficulty of building stable democracies in a troubled region. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to lead to the construction of a vibrant Iraqi democracy, and the example of that success was going to transform the Islamic world. That success would defang radical religious ideology, and all would be well in the best of all possible worlds.

President Obama opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but his administration clearly shared an extraordinary and even lyrical optimism about where the Middle East was headed. Just consider his early speeches in Cairo and Istanbul, his conviction that the Israeli-Palestinian issue could be solved, the evident belief of his administration that Egypt after Hosni Mubarak was in a "transition to democracy," the confidence that Iraq could survive without further U.S. military support.

Today we see a very different world. We are being forced to remember something we'd rather forget: that history is hard, that the choices it forces on us are sometimes harsh and that not everything ends in win-win.

The right practical response isn't isolationism, the idea that the U.S. can somehow turn its back on the whole sorry mess and let the world muddle through on its own. What we need instead is realistic goals and historical modesty—perhaps, at last, a foreign policy that is more about preventing catastrophes than constructing utopias.

—Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest.