In March 2003, then-President George W. Bush let a multinational land invasion of Iraq. At the time, ethnically diverse Iraq — one of the sundry Middle East states haphazardly crafted by clueless Europeans in the World War I-era Sykes-Picot Agreement — was run by thuggish Ba’athist strongman Saddam Hussein. Within weeks, Baghdad was held by U.S.-aligned forces. Less than a year later, Hussein was captured.
But that was deemed woefully insufficient by Bush-era foreign policy hands. Operating under the intellectually hubristic and universal values-ridden guise of a White House “Freedom Agenda,” Bush-era foreign policy was not content to engage in Israel Defense Forces-style one-off “strike and maneuver” tactical hits against threatening jihadist outfits. Rather, the Bush administration, in tandem with its concurrent nation-building project in the third-world sharia backwater hellhole of Afghanistan, sought a more enduring physical presence in order to help birth a Madisonian republic in the war-torn, ethnically fractious Iraqi desert.
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