What has Iraq done to America?
The Bush administration invaded Iraq on what has proved to be a false prospectus. It has made a terrible mess of the occupation. It has created more terrorist threats than were there before. Its military has shamed America with the torture in Abu Ghraib. It has provoked waves of anti-Americanism. And the whole business has been a vast, hugely expensive distraction from the pressing challenges that face America and Europe, including poverty, global warming and the very real struggle against the al-Qaida assassins of New York and Madrid. Even if things get better in Iraq, this indictment will stand.

Everyone is asking what America has done to Iraq. But the more important question is: what has Iraq done to America...
Iraq could mean the beginning of the end of vulcanism.

The vulcans is what the Bush foreign policy team called themselves, as they prepared for office. A 55ft high statue of the Olympian blacksmith, purveyor of thunderbolts to the gods, famously towers above Birmingham, Alabama, home town of Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. As the American writer James Mann shows in his fine book Rise of the Vulcans, the key members of Bush's team had certain things in common.

Their formative experiences were in the study or practice of military power. They believed, from the outset, in using the post-cold war moment to establish unchallengeable US military supremacy. Most of them believed in the assertive use of that military power to spread "American values" and fight "evil", defined in muscular Christian terms. And they thought America should not be too encumbered by allies, treaties or international organisations. Vulcan could do it alone.

Of course, there were differences between them. Those who had fought in the Vietnam war, like Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, were most reluctant to commit American soldiers to another war. The Vietnam draft avoiders such as Bush himself and vice president Dick Cheney ("I had other priorities in the 60s than military service"), were less reluctant to send others to do what they themselves had not done. The soldiers were keenest on diplomacy; the businessmen-politicians on war...

Lust for oil played some part, of course, as did neoconservative plans for a democratic revolution in the Middle East. But what seems to have been decisive was the president's gut instinct to respond to such an attack by going and "kicking butt". Whose butt exactly was, in a sense, secondary. Saddam happened to be the most obvious target. As one self-styled soccer mom told me, this attitude is what her kind in America loved about Bush. America had been hit; he was hitting back. This guy was in charge. He was kicking butt.

But no longer. Instead, it's Bush's own butt that's being kicked...
The Guardian