Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us or transfer to al-Qaida for use against the U.S. homeland.

Exact retribution for Saddam's complicity in 9/11 after we learned his agents had met secretly in Prague with Mohamed Atta.

Create a flourishing democracy in Baghdad that would serve as a catalyst for a miraculous transformation of the Middle East from a land of despots into a region of democracies that looked West.

Not all agreed on the wisdom of this war. Gen. Bill Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, thought George W. Bush & Co. had lost their minds: "The Iraq War may turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history."

Yet, a few weeks of "shock and awe," and U.S. forces had taken Baghdad and dethroned Saddam, who had fled but was soon found in a rat hole and prosecuted and hanged, as were his associates, "the deck of cards," some of whom met the same fate.

And so, 'twas a famous victory. Mission accomplished!

Soon, however, America found herself in a new, unanticipated war, and by 2006, we were, astonishingly, on the precipice of defeat, caught in a Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict produced by our having disbanded the Iraqi army and presided over the empowerment of the first Shia regime in the nation's history.

Only a "surge" of U.S. troops led by Gen. David Petraeus rescued the United States from a strategic debacle to rival the fall of Saigon.

But the surge could not rescue the Republican Party, which had lusted for this war, from repudiation by a nation that believed itself to have been misled, deceived and lied into war. In 2006, the party lost both houses of Congress, and the Pentagon architect of the war, Don Rumsfeld, was cashiered by the commander in chief.

Two years later, disillusionment with Iraq would contribute to the rout of Republican uber-hawk John McCain by a freshman senator from Illinois who had opposed the war.

So, how now does the ledger read, 10 years on? What is history's present verdict on what history has come to call Bush's war?

Of the three goals of the war, none was achieved. No weapon of mass destruction was found. While Saddam and his sons paid for their sins, they had had nothing at all to do with 9/11. Nothing. That had all been mendacious propaganda.

Where there had been no al-Qaida in Iraq while Saddam ruled, al-Qaida is crawling all over Iraq now. Where Iraq had been an Arab Sunni bulwark confronting Iran in 2003, a decade later, Iraq is tilting away from the Sunni camp toward the Shia crescent of Iran and Hezbollah.

What was the cost in blood and treasure of our Mesopotamian misadventure? Four thousand five hundred U.S. dead, 35,000 wounded and this summary of war costs from Friday's Wall Street Journal:

"The decade-long (Iraq) effort cost $1.7 trillion, according to a study ... by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Fighting over the past 10 years has killed 134,000 Iraqi civilians ... . Meanwhile, the nearly $500 billion in unpaid benefits to U.S. veterans of the Iraq war could balloon to $6 trillion" over the next 40 years.

Iraq made a major contribution to the bankrupting of America.

As for those 134,000 Iraqi civilian dead, that translates into 500,000 Iraqi widows and orphans. What must they think of us?

According to the latest Gallup poll, by 2-to-1, Iraqis believe they are more secure—now that the Americans are gone from their country.

Left behind, however, is our once-sterling reputation. Never before has America been held in lower esteem by the Arab peoples or the Islamic world. As for the reputation of the U.S. military, how many years will it be before our armed forces are no longer automatically associated with such terms as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, renditions and waterboarding?

As for the Chaldean and Assyrian Christian communities of Iraq who looked to America, they have been ravaged and abandoned, with many having fled their ancient homes forever.

We are not known as a reflective people. But a question has to weigh upon us. If Saddam had no WMD, had no role in 9/11, did not attack us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us, was our unprovoked attack on that country a truly just and moral war?

What makes the question more than academic is that the tub-thumpers for war on Iraq a decade ago are now clamoring for war on Iran. Goal: Strip Iran of weapons of mass destruction all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies say Iran does not have and has no program to build.

This generation is eyewitness to how a Great Power declines and falls. And to borrow from old King Pyrrhus, one more such victory as Iraq, and we are undone.

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Does the president, Paul demanded to know, in the absence of an imminent threat, have the right to order U.S. citizens killed by drone strike on U.S. soil?

By the time he sat down, 13 hours later, Paul had advanced to the front rank of candidates for 2016, and established himself as a foreign policy leader whose views must be consulted equally with those of John McCain.

How did he pull this off?

First, Attorney General Eric Holder arrogantly refused to rule out the possibility that President Obama could order execution by drone-strike of U.S. citizens, even here in the United States.

When Rand demanded to know what Holder was talking about, all across America people tuned in.

Here was a deadly serious issue: Had we, in our determination to prosecute the war on terror ferociously, begun to sacrifice our constitutionalist rights?

Libertarians, conservatives and liberals have all grown alarmed at the steady expansion of drone attacks from the Af-Pak to Yemen and Somalia and Lord knows where else, and from bin Laden jihadists in Afghanistan to Islamist propagandists like Anwar al Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, both U.S. citizens, in Yemen.

Whom do we have a right to kill? Americans are asking. What are the borders of the battlefield upon which we may designate an individual an enemy and kill him without warning?

Has America become part of that battlefield? Paul asked.

After hours of speaking, Paul had attracted a vast audience on C-SPAN and Twitter. Soon, colleagues who do not share all of his libertarian views—Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas—came down to the floor to speak for Rand and give him time to rest on his feet.

To see these new Republicans standing by Rand Paul presented the image of a band of brothers standing up for principle. Rarely has this Republican Party looked better than it did on Wednesday.

Then to the well of the Senate marched Rand's Kentucky colleague, the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to bestow his benediction. It was "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Schmaltzy, perhaps, but in a cynical age, inspiriting.

What made Rand's presentation so appealing was that he began it alone, inviting the mockery of the media. Second, it was done with simplicity and dignity, without histrionics or demagoguery.

Third, it was evident that a genuine principle of Rand's philosophy was at stake. Finally, like his father Ron and Jimmy Stewart, Rand has a bumpkin quality that fairly drips honesty and sincerity.

Agree or disagree, it is hard not to like the guy.

But the play would have been incomplete without the foils.

Thursday morning, John McCain, fresh from putting on the feed bag with Barack at the Jefferson Hotel, where he exited flashing his thumbs-up on how wonderfully the dinner had gone, came to the floor to declare himself disgusted with Sen. Paul and to pronounce his filibuster "ridiculous."

McCain was followed by Lindsey Graham, who lectured the senators who stood by Paul that he did not recall them being exercised about drone strikes when George W. Bush was president.

McCain and Graham both seemed deliberately to miss the point.

Paul was not attacking the use of drones against enemies on a battlefield. He wanted to know if Obama now regarded America as a battlefield, and if he regarded U.S. citizens as possible enemy combatants who may be targeted and killed without due process of law.

Paul's victory was conceded when a letter arrived from Holder conceding that he and the president now agreed with Sen. Paul.

What Paul achieved in a half day of speaking from the Senate floor is astonishing. There is a new tent pole in the GOP that stands as tall as any of the rest.

McCain and Graham, who are routinely trotted out by Big Media to speak for the party—can they any longer claim to do so?

Last week, they seemed isolated. And, on the weekend, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy declared Paul's performance "fantastic," and backhanded the Republicans who attacked him.

Paul himself handled McCain's insults well. "I treat Sen. McCain with respect," he told Mike Huckabee. "I don't think I always get the same in return."

Henceforth, be the issue sending weapons to Syrian insurgents, or launching a war on Iran, the media will have to consult Sen. Paul, who can credibly claim to speak for a large segment of the GOP.

The hegemony of the neocons and the lockstep conformity of a vast a slice of the GOP that cost Reagan's party its primacy during the Bush wars, seems to be coming to an end.

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With those brave, wise, simple words, Benedict XVI announced an end of his papacy. How stands the Church he has led for eight years?

While he could not match the charisma of his predecessor, John Paul II, his has been a successful papacy. He restored some of the ancient beauty and majesty to the liturgy. He brought back to the fold separated Anglican brethren. The Church is making converts in sub-Saharan Africa. And in America, new traditionalist colleges and seminaries have begun to flourish.

That is looking back eight years. Looking back half a century, to that October day in 1962 when Pope John XXIII declared the opening of Vatican II, the Church appears to have been in a decline that, in parts of the world, seems to be leading to near extinction.

At Vatican II, the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, was among the reformers who were going to bring the church into the modern world. The encounter did not turn out well.

In 1965, three in four American Catholics attended Sunday mass. Today, it is closer to one in four. The number of priests has fallen by a third, of nuns by two-thirds. Orders like the Christian Brothers have virtually vanished. The Jesuits are down to a fraction of their strength in the 1950s.

Parochial schools teaching 4.5 million children in the early 1960s were teaching a third of that number at the end of the century. Catholic high schools lost half their enrollment. Churches have been put up for sale to pay diocesan debts.

And the predator-priest sex-abuse scandal, with the offenses dating back decades, continues to suppurate and stain her reputation and extract billions from the Sunday collections of the abiding faithful.

The highest-ranking Catholic politicians, Vice President Joe Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, support same-sex marriage and belong to a party whose platform calls for funding abortions to the day of birth. Catholic teaching on contraception, divorce and sexual morality is openly mocked.

Yet, while colleges like Georgetown appear Catholic in name only, others—like Christendom in Front Royal, Va., St. Thomas More in Merrimack, N.H, and St. Thomas Aquinas near Los Angeles—have picked up the torch.

Among Catholics, there has long been a dispute over the issue: Did Vatican II cause the crisis in the Church, or did the council merely fail to arrest what was an inevitable decline with the triumph of the counterculture of the 1960s?

As one looks around the world and back beyond the last half-century, it seems that Catholicism and Christianity have been in a centuries-long retreat. In the mid-19th century, Matthew Arnold wrote in "Dover Beach":

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar ...

In Christianity's cradle, the Holy Land and the Near East, from Egypt to Afghanistan, Christians are subjected to persecution and pogroms, as their numbers dwindle. In Latin America, the Church has been losing congregants for decades.

In Europe, Christianity is regarded less as the founding faith of the West and the wellspring of Western culture and civilization, than as an antique; a religion that European Man once embraced before the coming of the Enlightenment. Many cathedrals on the continent have taken on the aspect of Greek and Roman temples—places to visit and marvel at what once was, and no longer is.

The Faith is Europe, Europe is the Faith, wrote Hilaire Belloc. And when the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people die. So historians and poets alike have written.

Surely that seems true in Europe. In the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Western Man, under the banners of God and country, conquered almost the entire world. But now that Christianity has died in much of the West, the culture seems decadent, the civilization in decline.

And the people have begun to die. No Western nation has had a birth rate in three decades that will enable its native-born to survive.

Dispensing with Christianity, Western peoples sought new gods and new faiths: communism, Leninism, fascism, Nazism. Those gods all failed.

Now we have converted to even newer faiths to create paradise in this, the only world we shall ever know. Democratic capitalism, consumerism, globalism, environmentalism, egalitarianism.

The Secular City seems to have triumphed over the City of God. But in the Islamic world, an ancient and transcendental faith is undergoing a great awakening after centuries of slumber and seems anxious to re-engage and settle accounts with an agnostic West.

As ever, the outcome of the struggle for the world is in doubt.

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Thus did political analyst Mitt Romney identify the cause of his defeat in a call to disconsolate contributors.

Republicans piled on. "Completely unhelpful," Gov. Bobby Jindal told Wolf Blitzer. We don't advance the "debate by insulting folks."

"A terrible thing to say," Chris Christie told Joe Scarborough. "You can't expect to be the leader of all the people and be divisive."

Oh. Was not Abe Lincoln at least mildly "divisive"? Did not FDR insult Wall Street folks by calling them "money changers in the temple of our civilization"? Was Ronald Reagan a uniter not a divider when he said, "Let the bloodbath begin!" and mocked "welfare queens"?

And Harry Truman, did he not insult and divide—and win?

"I just think it's nuts," Newt Gingrich told ABC's Martha Raddatz of Romney's remark, kicking him again in an Austin TV interview:

"Gov. Romney's analysis ... is insulting and profoundly wrong. ... We didn't lose Asian-Americans because they got any gifts. He did worse with Asian-Americans than he did with Latinos. This is the hardest-working and most successful ethnic group in America, OK, they ain't into gifts."

Now, Newt does have a point.

What explains the GOP wipeout among Asian-Americans? Folks of Korean, Chinese and Japanese descent have a legendary work ethic, are academic overachievers, and are possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit. They should be natural Republicans.

But Mitt also has a point.

Consider America's largest, fastest-growing minority.

Hispanics constituted 10 percent of the electorate, up from 7.5 in 2008. But Mitt got only 27 percent of that, the lowest of any Republican presidential candidate.

This, we are told, was because of Mitt's comment about "self-deportation" and GOP support for a border fence and sanctions on employers who hire illegals. If only we embrace the Dream Act and provide a path to citizenship—amnesty—the GOP's problem is solved.

The Republican capacity for self-delusion is truly awesome.

Set aside the idealized Hispanic of the Republican consultants' vision. What does the real Hispanic community look like today?

Let us consider only native-born Hispanics, U.S. citizens.

According to Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which analyzed Census Bureau statistics from 2012:

—More than one in five Hispanic citizens lives in poverty.

—One in four Hispanic-American men 25 to 55 is out of work.

—More than half of all Hispanic women 25-55 are unmarried.

—Half of all Hispanic households with children are headed by an unmarried woman, and 55 percent depend on welfare programs.

These numbers do not improve with time, as they did with the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and German immigrants who poured into the United States between 1890 and 1920. Third-generation Hispanics do worse than second-generation Hispanics in all the above categories.

This is a huge community being sucked into the morass of a mammoth welfare state. Consider a typical Hispanic household with children.

It is headed by an unmarried women who receives food stamps and public housing or rent supplements to feed and house her children.

Her kids are educated free from Head Start to K-12 and fed by school breakfast and lunch programs. Should they graduate high school, Pell Grants and student loans are there for college.

For cash, mom gets welfare checks. If she takes a job, she will receive an earned income tax credit to supplement her income. If she loses her job, she can get 99 weeks of unemployment checks.

For health care, there is Medicaid and Obamacare. And like 45 percent of all Hispanic households, she has no federal income tax liability.

Why should this woman vote for a party that will cut taxes she does not pay, but reduce benefits she does receive?

Rename Romney's gifts "government services," writes Aaron Blake citing a Washington Post poll, and one discovers that 67 percent of Latinos favor "a larger government with more services."

These are big government people. And why should they not be?

According to Heather Mac Donald, writing in National Review, a 2011 survey found that California Hispanics by four to one objected more to the GOP on class-warfare grounds—the party "favors only the rich," Republicans are "selfish"—than to the GOP stand on immigration.

Writes Mac Donald: California's Hispanics will likely prove more decisive in passing Proposition 30, to raise state income taxes to 13.3 percent, the highest level in the nation, than to Obama's victory.

Nor is this unusual. Populist programs to stick it to the rich have always had an appeal south of the border.

There are 50 million Hispanics in America today. California is lost to the GOP. Nevada and Colorado are slipping away. Arizona and Texas are next up on the block.

With the U.S. Hispanic population in 2050 projected to reach 130 million, the acolytes of Karl Rove have their work cut out for them.

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Gen. Sherman's burning of Atlanta and March to the Sea ensured Abraham Lincoln's re-election in 1864.

William McKinley, with his triumph over Spain and determination to pacify and hold the Philippines, easily held off William Jennings Bryan in 1900.

Yet Woodrow Wilson won in 1916 on the slogan, "He Kept Us Out of War!" And Dwight Eisenhower won a landslide with his declaration about the stalemate in Harry Truman's war: "I shall go to Korea."

Richard Nixon pledged in 1968 that "new leadership will end the war and win the peace." Vice President Hubert Humphrey, behind by double digits on Oct. 1, promised to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. He united his party and closed the gap to less than a point by Election Day.

George McGovern ran as an antiwar candidate in 1972. By November, almost all U.S. troops were home from Vietnam, however, and in late October Henry Kissinger had announced, "Peace is at hand." Nixon had expropriated the peace issue. Result: 49 states.

Today, after the longest wars in our history in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans are sick over the 6,500 dead and 40,000 wounded, fed up with the $2 trillion in costs, and disillusioned with the results that a decade of sacrifice has produced in Baghdad and Kabul.

Aware of this war weariness, especially among women, President Obama and Vice President Biden seem intent on appearing before the nation on Election Day as the sole peace party. This fact leaps out of a close read of Biden's debate transcript.

Lost in his manic grinning and mocking laughter at Paul Ryan's points and rude interruptions was a recurring theme: President Obama ended the war in Iraq and is dialing back the war in Afghanistan, but Ryan and Romney seem to be looking to new military interventions in Syria and Iran.

Consider but a few Biden comments nestled in the transcript of his half of that 90-minute debate.

"The last thing we need now is another war."

"Are you (Ryan) ... going to go to war?"

"We will not let them (the Iranians) acquire a nuclear weapon, period, unless he's (Ryan) talking about going to war."

"War should always be the absolute last resort."

"He (Ryan) voted to put two wars on a credit card."

"We've been in this war (Afghanistan) for over a decade. ... We are leaving in 2014, period."

About intervention in Syria, Biden said: "The last thing America needs is to get into another ground war in the Middle East, requiring tens of thousands if not well over a hundred thousand American forces."

This drumbeat, implying Romney and Ryan are champing at the bit to get into the war in Syria or into a new war with Iran, was deliberate.

Biden's words almost surely reflect what Democratic focus groups, pollsters, political analysts and pundits are advising the party to say and do: Play the peace card Monday night in Boca Raton, Fla., and tag Romney-Ryan as a trigger-happy ticket of the war party.

The charges Romney is likely to hear from the president and the questions he is likely to face from the moderator, pushing him toward bellicosity, are not that difficult to discern.

"Governor, President Obama has said Iran will not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. You have said Iran will not be allowed to have a 'nuclear weapons capability.' What is the difference? Doesn't Iran already have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon? What will you do about it?"

"Governor, Paul Ryan said in his debate Iran 'is racing toward a nuclear weapon." But 16 U.S. intelligence agencies said in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2011 that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. What is your evidence that Iran is 'racing toward a nuclear weapon?'"

"Governor, you have said of America and Israel, 'The world must never see daylight between our two nations.' Does that mean if Israel attacks Iran, you would take us to war on Israel's side?"

"Governor, at VMI you said, 'In Syria, I will work ... to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad's tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.' Would you give surface-to-air missiles to the Syrian rebels?"

"Governor, Japan and China are at sword's point over the Senkaku Islands. If war breaks out, are we obligated by our alliance with Japan to come to her defense?"

The Republican peril in Boca Raton is that headlines the next day will have Romney, consciously or inadvertently, laying down some marker for a new war.

"Peace through strength," the Eisenhower-Reagan slogan, is the GOP slogan that still resonates with American voters.

Even in 1940, FDR, though plotting war, ran as a peace candidate:

"I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

Hopefully, Gov. Romney will say something like this, and mean it.

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But where Reagan won with style and quips—"There you go again"—and his closing line, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Romney crushed Obama on both substance and style.

Mitt was like a contender so keyed up by his title shot that, between rounds, he could not sit on his stool, but stood in his corner to rush out and re-engage the champ the instant the bell sounded for the next round.

Obama was mauled, with facts, figures, anecdotes, arguments, jokes, quips. A smiling Romney was on offense all night. And the president's performance seems inexplicable.

With the split screen showing his response to Romney's swarm attacks, he appeared diffident, sullen, pouting, flustered, petulant.

Obama made no serious blunder. Yet, on the split screen, as Romney lectured him with a stern smile, Obama seemed a chastened schoolboy, head down, being instructed by a professor that if he did not get his grades up he would not be back next semester.

The verdict on the Denver encounter—that Romney turned in the performance of his life and one of the most impressive in the history of presidential debates, and that the president underperformed, was outclassed and lost badly—was virtually unanimous.

Indeed, liberal columnists and commentators are among those most angered and appalled at Obama's performance.

Why did he not fight back, they ask, with all the ammunition at his disposal?

The defense being offered by the Obama spinners is that Mitt was brazenly changing positions right up there on stage, that he was not telling the truth about his positions, that he was misstating facts.

But that leaves a glaring question. Why, then, didn't the president call him out? To this they have no answer.

Where does the race stand, a month from Election Day?

Members of the Republican commentariat who were grousing that Mitt had blown it may now become enthusiastic again, as clearly this race is far from over. Folks in the grandstand who were heading for the exit ramps are heading back to their seats.

We have a brand new ballgame here.

But if the campaign of 2012 is not lost, not by a long shot, it is not won, either.

The first sign of how great a recovery Mitt made will come next week in the head-to-head polls, when the nation has absorbed the news that Obama not only got waxed, he came off as man exhausted, weary with the duties of office, who lacks the fire and energy to lead us out of the economic doldrums in which this country finds itself.

Yet even if the national polls find Mitt surging, the polls in the battleground states will have to turn dramatically, as early voting is already taking place in half of the country. And that voting began when it appeared that Obama was coasting to a second term.

Can Ohio, for example, where Mitt has been consistently down by high single digits, be retrieved?

Is Wisconsin just too far a reach?

Perhaps the greatest advance Mitt Romney made in that debate was that, for once, he came off not just as a tough businessman and resolute budget-cutter who can put the nation's fiscal house in order, but as something of a conservative of the heart.

This has always been the missing dimension.

The reaction of the Obamaites to the thrashing their man sustained is probably not going to be sportsmanlike. We will now hear more of the Gordon Gecko of Bain Capital writing off the 47 percent and more on the missing tax returns and Cayman Islands account.

But if we do, that will also tell the nation something.

It will testify to the truth that Barack Obama is not the nice guy he is portrayed as being. And if his campaign reverts to the low road, it will convey another unmistakable message: i.e., the president cannot win on his record; he cannot win in debates about the future. Where Reagan after his first term spoke of "Morning in America," the only way Obama can win a second term is to demonize his opponent.

Gov. Romney still has miles to go before he sleeps. But the president is today facing a dilemma, as well.

Given his performance, one of the worst in debate history, Obama cannot afford to lose a second or third debate like that. This crushing defeat has to be shown to be, and to be seen as, an aberration.

Otherwise, the country may conclude that no matter how much it likes him, Obama as a leader is burned out, a mechanic who has tried every tool in the toolbox but cannot get the machinery running again.

The first debate made the race a toss-up again. The second could decide it.

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It gave purpose and clarity to our politics and foreign policy, and our lives.

From the fall of Berlin in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that Cold War was waged by two generations, and with its end Americans faced a fundamental question:

If the historic struggle between communism and freedom is over, if the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union no longer exist, if the Russians wish to befriend us and the Maoists have taken the capitalist road, what is our new mission in the world? What do we do now?

The debate was suspended when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. George H.W. Bush assembled a mighty coalition and won a war that required but 100 hours of ground combat.

We had found our mission.

The United States was the last superpower and a triumphant Bush declared that we would build the "New World Order." Neoconservatives rhapsodized over America's "unipolar moment" and coming "global hegemony."

But Americans were unpersuaded and uninspired. They rejected the victor of Desert Storm—for Bill Clinton. By Y2K, the Republican Party was backing another Bush who was promising a "more humble" America.

Came then 9/11 and the midlife conversion of George W. to Wilsonian interventionism. After the rout of the Taliban in December 2001, Bush decided to remake Afghanistan in the image of Iowa and to go crusading against an axis of evil. In his second inaugural, he declared that America's mission was to "end tyranny in our world."

The world declined to oblige. By the end of 2006, the Taliban were back and America seemed in an endless war in Iraq. Republicans had lost Congress and Bush's democracy crusade was producing electoral victories for Hamas and Hezbollah.

In November 2008, the crusaders were sent packing.

Came then Barack Obama. With the "Arab Spring" beginning in 2010, with dictators being toppled in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria, Obama embraced the movement as his own.

But Obama received a rude awakening. As the Arab dictators began, one by one, to fall, also unleashed and now surging and spreading through the lands they had ruled were the four horsemen of the Arab apocalypse: tribalism, ethno-nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism. So we come to an elementary question:

If the Islamic world is so suffused with rage and hatred of us—for our wars, occupations, drone attacks, support of Israel, decadent culture, and tolerance of insults to Islam and the Prophet—why should we call for free elections, when the people will use those elections to vote into power rulers hostile to the United States?

If the probable or inevitable result of dethroning dictator-allies is to raise to power Islamist enemies, why help dethrone the dictators?

During the Cold War, the United States took its friends where it found them. If they were willing to cast their lot with us, from the Shah to Gen. Pinochet, we welcomed them. Democratic dissidents like Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Olof Palme in Sweden got the back of our hand.

During the Cold War and World War II, the critical question was not whether you came to power through free elections—after all, Adolf Hitler did that—but are you with us or against us?

Ideology, as Russell Kirk admonished us, is political religion, and democracy worship is a form of idolatry, the worshiping of a false god, a golden calf, an idol.

And—while this may border on a hate crime—some countries are unfit for democracy. As Edmund Burke remonstrated: "It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

With hatred of America rampant across the Arab and Islamic world, we face anew a defining moment. What now is our mission in the world? What now should be the great goal of U.S. foreign policy?

What global objective should we pursue with our trillion-dollar defense, intel and foreign aid budgets, and pervasive diplomatic and military presence on every continent and in most countries of the world? Bush I's New World Order is history, given our strategic decline and the resistance of Russia, China and the Islamic world.

Bush II's democracy crusade and Obama's embrace of the Arab Spring have unleashed and empowered forces less receptive to America's wishes and will than the despots and dictators deposed with our approval.

All three visions proved to be illusions. With America headed for bankruptcy, with new debt of $1 trillion piled up each year, perhaps John Quincy Adams' counsel may commend itself to a country weary from a century of crusades.

"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

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William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

Had the popular Cal Coolidge sought a second full term in 1928 instead of declaring, "I do not choose to run," he would have been in the White House when the crash came and cast by history in the role assigned to Hoover.

But, as one wag said, Silent Cal's career seems to have been a product of repeated celestial interventions.

By 1952, Harry Truman was a failed president. His approval rating was below 25 percent. Chiang Kai-shek's China had fallen to communism. Josef Stalin had stolen the secret of the atom bomb through espionage against the United States. Truman had fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur and was in the third year of a Korean War he could neither win nor end.

The administration had been exposed as shot through with corruption and treason in the persons of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the Rosenberg atomic spy ring, among others.

Rejected in New Hampshire, Harry wisely chose to pack it in.

Lyndon Johnson, his 44-state landslide in 1964 and Great Society notwithstanding, was by 1968 a failed president being repudiated in the primaries of his own party.

Truman and Johnson quit rather than run again and risk defeat.

But Jimmy Carter, whose poll numbers fell as low as Truman's and who was widely seen as a failed president, chose to fight Teddy Kennedy in the primaries and Ronald Reagan in the general election.

Carter had one signal achievement: the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

But by 1980, he was presiding over an economy with 21 percent interest rates, 13 percent inflation and zero growth. The Soviet Empire had annexed Afghanistan and was on the move in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. Iran had fallen to the mullahs. Fifty American embassy personnel were being held hostage in Tehran.

What makes that 1980 election relevant is that it was the last national election and the only postwar election where a Democratic president widely perceived to have failed chose to run for re-election.

And what strategy did the Carter campaign adopt?

They sought to demonize Reagan as a tool of the rich, a cold-hearted wretch who would savage the safety net, a crazed anti-communist Cold Warrior whom it would be dangerous to entrust with nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan was Barry Goldwater redux.

Yet, looking back, what else could Carter do? Looking forward, what else can Barack Obama do?

By 1984, Reagan could credibly run for re-election on the slogan, "Stay the Course." Let us continue on this path that is leading us to the sunny uplands of a new prosperity and a stronger, more respected America.

Carter could not do that in 1980. Hoover could not do that in 1932. And Obama cannot do that today.

With the nation believing Carter had failed by the fall of 1980, and prepared to remove and replace him, Carter had one lane left to victory. He and the liberal media had to define Reagan for the electorate as an uncaring extremist and dangerous man.

Lest we forget, this Carter strategy was working.

Not until the late debate with Carter did the electorate take a closer look at Reagan and decide that this genial, principled conservative was no threat, but an acceptable alternative and far preferable to four more years of Carter.

After that debate, the undecideds came down hard for Reagan, millions of Democrats switched to him, and he buried Carter.

Again, that election is relevant because it is the election most similar to this one. We have a Democratic president who has presided over a huge loss of jobs, four straight trillion-dollar deficits and 42 months of unemployment over 8 percent. With Obama's approval in the 40s, it is clear that America is ready for a change.

One difference between 2012 and 1980? President Obama retains a reservoir of goodwill President Carter never acquired.

If this analysis is correct, the Democratic convention and the next nine weeks will witness one sustained slander of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as Ayn Randian agents of a plutocracy hell-bent on seeing its taxes reduced and the tax cuts paid for by eviscerating programs on which America's poor and the working and middle class depend for survival.

The one sure way Obama can win is to convince a nation ready for change—to fear, loathe and recoil from the proposed agents of change.

Obama aides and media auxiliary have already painted the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., as permeated with lies and dog whistles to racists.

Yet, one wonders: After such a campaign, how does Obama unite and lead the country should he win.

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The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled.

The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of "The End of History." Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism.

Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.

Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines—Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path.

A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran's northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran's Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.

The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years' War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by 19th and 20th century European cartographers, but in blood.

India, too, is feeling the tremors. Ethnic violence in the Assam region has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing in panic.

In East Asia, ethnonationalism, fed by memories from the 20th century, is igniting clashes among former Cold War allies.

China's claim to the Spratly, Paracel and other islands in the South China Sea puts Beijing in conflict with Hanoi, which welcomes U.S. warships back to Cam Ranh Bay. Were not these the same people we bombed and blasted not so long ago?

Twenty years ago, Manila ordered the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay, which had been home to the U.S. Pacific Fleet almost since the Spanish-American war. Now Manila is inviting America back.

Why? China is claiming islets, atolls and reefs 1,000 miles from the Chinese mainland, but only 100 miles from the Philippine coast.

To annex what could be a mother lode of oil, gas and minerals in the South China Sea, China is stoking the ethnonationalism of its own people.

Yet, a fear of ethnonationalism is behind Beijing's repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, whose regions are being inundated with Han Chinese, just as Josef Stalin flooded Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia with Russians after annexing them in 1940.

"All is race; there is no other truth," wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel "Tancred." Beijing behaves as if it believes Disraeli was right.

China now claims Japan's Senkaku islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyu. South Korea claims Japan's Takeshima in the East China Sea, which Seoul calls Dokdo. Here history enters the quarrel.

In 1908, in the Root-Takahira Agreement, Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Tokyo's annexation of Korea in return for recognition of U.S. annexation of the Philippines.

Root-Takahira is a black page in Korean history. For Japan's occupation ran through World War II, when Korean girls were forced into prostitution as "comfort women" for Japanese troops. Tokyo and Seoul were Cold War allies, but these old wounds never healed.

The visit to Dokdo last week by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, cheered by his countrymen, represented a rejection of Japan's claim and an assertion that the islets belong to Korea.

Russia, too, has now gotten into the islands game.

Two days after the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the day before Nagasaki, Stalin declared war and sent Russian troops to seize the Kuril islands north of Japan and expel the population. Japan still claims the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev just stoked the flames of tribalism in both nations by visiting the Kuril island that is closest to Japan.

With China, South Korea and Russia asserting claims and making intrusions on islands Japan regards as sacred territory, Tokyo is taking a new look at rebuilding her armed forces.

On Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, two cabinet ministers visited the Yasukuni Shrine to the World War II dead. A new nationalism is rising in the Land of the Rising Sun. China and Russia may be nuclear powers, but Japan could join that club swiftly should she chose to do so.

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end—the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

As Abraham Lincoln said in another time, when an old world was dying and a new world was being born, "As our situation is new, let us think and act anew."

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So wrote H.G. Wells in What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War in the year of Verdun and the Somme Offensive.

In redrawing the map of Europe, however, the statesmen of Versailles ignored Wells and parceled out Austrians, Hungarians, Germans and other nationalities to alien lands to divide, punish and weaken the defeated peoples.

So doing they set the table for a second world war.

The Middle East was sliced up along lines set down in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. But with the Islamic awakening and Arab Spring toppling regimes, the natural map of the Middle East seems now to be asserting itself.

Sunni and Shia align with Sunni and Shia, as Protestants and Catholics did in 17th-century Europe. Ethiopia and Sudan split. Mali and Nigeria may be next. While world attention is focused on Aleppo and when Bashar Assad might fall, Syria itself may be about to disintegrate p.

In Syria's northeast, a Kurdish minority of 2 to 3 million with ethnic ties to Iraqi Kurdistan and 15 million Kurds in Turkey seems to be dissolving its ties to Damascus. A Kurdish nation carved out of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran would appear to be a casus belli for all four nations. Yet in any natural map of the world, there would be a Kurdistan.

The Sunni four-fifths of the Syrian population seems fated to rise and the Muslim Brotherhood to rule, as happened in Egypt. The fall of Assad and his Shia Alawite minority would be celebrated by the Sunni across the border in Iraq's Anbar province, who would then have a powerful new ally in any campaign to recapture Sunni lands lost to Iraqi Shia.

With its recent murderous attacks inside Iraq, al-Qaida seems to be instigating a new Sunni-Shia war to tear Iraq apart.

The fall of the Alawites in Damascus would end the dream of a Shia crescent—Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah—leave Hezbollah isolated, and conceivably lead to a renewal of Lebanon's sectarian and civil war.

The losers in all this? Certainly Iran, which seems fated to lose its only Arab ally, Syria, and its land link to Hezbollah.

That would make Israel a winner. But Israel's situation appears more perilous than it was a decade ago.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has replaced Hosni Mubarak, who kept the peace in Sinai and the lid on Hamas. Recently, new Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi met with Hamas' Khaled Meshaal at the presidential palace in Cairo. The Sinai is becoming a no man's land where terrorists plot and Africans cross to Israel.

To Israel's east, there is no true peace with the Palestinians, and the Jordanian throne has rarely been shakier. On the Golan Heights, quiet for decades, the future may see Syrian troops loyal to a militant Sunni regime in Damascus. Hezbollah sits on Israel's northern border. Beyond is a Turkey no longer friendly.

Israel is blaming the atrocity in Bulgaria, in which Israeli tourists were massacred, on Iran. But neither the Bulgarians nor the Americans appear to know who did it. And why would the Iranians, who, following the slaughter, publicly denounced such atrocities against civilians, do it?

Were an Iranian hand to be found in this act of barbarism, it would give Israel justification for an attack, igniting a war in which America could be dragged in.

Why would Iran want a war with the United States when that would mean destruction of its air force, navy, missile force and nuclear program, a crippling blockade and perhaps destruction of its vital oil facilities on Kharg Island?

Whoever was behind the attack on the Israeli tourists seems to want a war between the Jewish state of Israel and the Shia state of Iran.

Who would benefit from such a war?

Answer: Al-Qaida, which, during the Iraq War, urged the United States to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. An al-Qaida affiliate has also attacked Israeli vacationers before, at Egyptian resorts on the Gulf of Aqaba.

"There is an international plot against Gulf states in particular and Arab countries in general ... to take over our fortunes," says Dubai's chief of police. "I had no idea that there is this large number of Muslim Brotherhood in the Gulf states."

What is al-Qaida's goal? Ignite Sunni-Shia wars and Muslim-Christian clashes in Arab states. Draw in the Americans to smash Iran. And when the Sunni are ascendant, expel the Americans and Christians, isolate Israel and set about creating the caliphate of Osama bin Laden's dream.

If a U.S. war on Iran is good for al-Qaida, how can it be good or us?

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