What's worse, the dominant trend in public opinion is so often on the side of just those mistakes. You'd think someone would learn something. And in that someone I include "we, the people," the nation as a whole.
Yet now, facing the Islamic State, you guessed it: we're doing it all over again.
Let me try to lay out our repetitive mistakes, all six of them, one by one, starting with...
Mistake Number One: Treating the enemy as absolute evil, not even human.
Barack Obama called the Paris tragedy "an attack on all of humanity," which means that, even for the president, IS fighters stand outside that category. They are evidently some other species and merely appear to be human. And this was the mildest of descriptions in this overheated political season of ours. "The face of evil" sounds modest indeed compared to the vivid images offered by the Republicans vying to replace him. For Ben Carson, IS are a bunch of "rabid dogs"; for Ted Cruz, "scorpions." Donald Trump calls them "insane," "animals."
All point to the same dangerous conclusion: Since we are human and they are not, we are their opposite in every way. If they are absolute evil, we must be the absolute opposite. It's the old apocalyptic tale: God's people versus Satan's. It ensures that we never have to admit to any meaningful connection with the enemy. By this logic, it couldn't be more obvious that the nation our leaders endlessly call "exceptional" and "indispensable," the only nation capable of leading the rest of the world in the war against evil, bears no relationship to that evil.
That leads to...
Mistake Number Two: Buried in the assumption that the enemy is not in any sense human like us is absolution for whatever hand we may have had in sparking or contributing to evil's rise and spread. How could we have fertilized the soil of absolute evil or bear any responsibility for its successes? It's a basic postulate of wars against evil: God's people must be innocent.
As a result, we don't need to look at all the ways in which the U.S., even in battle mode, continues to contribute to the successes of Islamic State fighters in Sunni Arab lands by, for instance, supporting an Iraqi Shi'ite regime in Baghdad that has a grim history of oppressing Sunnis, a history that drives many of them to tolerate, or even actively support IS.
By refusing a future role of any sort for Syria's president Bashar al-Assad, we have hindered the diplomatic process that might heal the civil war in that country. Instead we let the Syrian chaos continue as a breeding ground for IS expansion (though perhaps this policy is just beginning to change). Our long-term alliance with Saudi Arabia is equally counterproductive, protecting funding networks that feed a burgeoning caliphate.
Just as we don't look at all this in the present, so we blind ourselves to what the U.S. has done in the past. Consider this...
Mistake Number Three: Call it blotting out history. We lose the ability to really understand the enemy because we ignore the actual history of how that enemy came to be, of how a network of relationships grew up in which we played, and continue to play, a central role.
The historical record is clear for all who care to look: The U.S. (the CIA in particular) was a key to the creation, funding, and arming of the mujahidin, the rebel fighters in Afghanistan who took on the Soviet army there in the 1980s, the men (often extreme Islamists) whom President Ronald Reagan compared to our founding fathers. From that situation came al-Qaeda.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq cracked the region open and paved the way for the Islamic State. The Bush administration tore Iraq to shreds and then demobilized Saddam Hussein's army and dispatched its members to the unemployment lines of a wrecked country.
One of those shreds, al-Qaeda in Iraq, populated by disaffected officers from that disbanded army, would later transform itself into the nucleus of the new Islamic State movement. Indeed the U.S. nurtured the present leadership of that movement in American military prisons in Iraq, where we introduced them to each other, so to speak. The process was at least hastened, and perhaps ultimately caused, by the vehement anti-Sunni bias of the Shi'ite Iraqi government, which the U.S. installed in power and also nurtured.
To sustain our image of ourselves as innocents in the whole affair, we have to blot out this empirical history and replace it with a myth (not so surprising, given that any war against evil is a mythic enterprise). That's not to say that we deny all the facts. We just pick and choose the ones that fit our myth best.
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