Michael, you won't get a flat-out rejection of your critique of America from me. While I love this country deeply and profoundly, all things considered, my heart and soul are not empty of stinging criticisms of my own, which often mirror your concerns in outline but rarely in a full-bodied portrait. Our very roots are tainted by the treatment of Indians and the usurpation that followed, and by the scourge of slavery that was woven into a way of life for many and a convenient constitutional compromise (at first) by all others. The frontier mentality that won us the West still pervades our culture, having both salutary but also harmful effects, as "difficulties" (often other human beings) in our path of progress are simply so many challenges to be conquered on one's way to fulfilling his purpose. And that purpose, reinforced by a sanctified economic system exalting competition without much philosophical seasoning from humanizing principles like cooperation, equity, fairness and justice, for example, is deemed a sacred quest of its own. When these combinations, and others, are brought to bear on a problem to the exclusion of the redeeming, ameliorating or just plain virtuous things America has to offer (which I won't emphasize here), bad things can happen.
The focus here, of course, is Iraq. I disagree with you fundamentally that the invasion -- at the time the decision to go was made -- was anything but a close call. Unfortunately and regrettably its folly is apparent now, regardless of outcome. But at the time of decision, laboring under democratically-elected and democratically-tested precepts and responding to a unique, catastrophic event signaling an insidious danger lurking in the world, on a balance of all factors, though I would now vote not to authorize, the decision to go was intellectually and morally defensible. (I have sketched some of those reasons previously and will not now bother to repeat myself.)
Horrible things happened on the way to "victory." According to my personal set of values, there were (are they ever acceptable?) unacceptable civilian casualties, and I include even those countless unfortunates killed by the insurgency for it was the result of a fuse we lit. There was the shocking spectacle of prisoner abuse following hard on the heels of a top-down (though clueless as to this) culture of toughness. And there is the insult, if it can be called that, of our presumption of influence and our exercise of prerogatives in what is the domain of other men and women.
But, through the lottery of history, we are now the world's only military superpower, its most dynamic economic engine, its oasis of freedom if not sophistication, the world's leader in higher education, the seat of hope beyond all others, and so on infinitum, which not only creates our power but also a certain responsibility. And that, in an open and well-educate society, is a self-correcting enterprise, and, duly chastened but tough, the salvation of the hopes of humans on earth, so long as our turn at stewardship lasts.
