GOP presidents have a bad track record

There is no doubt that President Donald J. Trump’s reckless assassination of a top Iranian general escalated tensions with one of our more dangerous adversaries and further destabilized the Middle East.

If the United States manages to avoid war with Iran, it won’t be because of any wise moves on the part of our president. His decision to discard the nuclear agreement with Tehran was already a colossal blunder — one bound to have more dire consequences now.

Still, there is plenty of blame to go around for the current mess in the Middle East. George W. Bush has enjoyed a rehabilitated reputation, mostly because he was the last Republican president whose administration was not a daily clown fiesta.

It’s easy, now, to look back and imagine Bush as a statesman. He wasn’t. His foolhardy invasion of Iraq has been extremely costly. The U.S. Treasury has spent billions of dollars. Thousands of American servicemen and -women have been killed, as have tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and insurgents. But that is a relatively minor toll compared to the number of civilians killed in violence since the invasion — more than 200,000, according to the Iraq Body Count Project.

That’s not all. While Republican hawks and neoconservatives who cheered for the invasion are loath to admit it, the decision to topple Saddam Hussein — thug though he was — strengthened and emboldened Iran. He was the mortal enemy of the ayatollahs who control Iran, and his hostility helped keep Iran in check.

So few Americans understand the political and cultural realities of the Middle East that the Lindsay Grahams and Mike Pompeos of the world can get away with their unvarnished lies about U.S. military strikes keeping peace in the region. But it isn’t just average voters who know little about Iran and Iraq.

Bush didn’t know much, either. According to credible reports in the aftermath of his decision to invade Iraq, Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shi’a — different branches of Islam that have been in violent conflict for centuries.

Iran’s ayatollahs and most of its citizens are Shi’a; though Saddam’s rule was largely secular, he grew up as a Sunni. Think of it as similar to the violent conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that dominated Western Europe for generations.

They were all Christians, but each group believed God wanted them to kill the other side.

In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, leading to a bloody eight-year war that killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers but left no clear winner. (The United States, for its part, provided logistical support to Iraq, believing it was in our strategic interest to do so.) By 1988, both countries were humbled — a situation that America and its allies regarded as akin to stability.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 1991, President George H.W. Bush sagely left Saddam in power.

But then came 9/11, an atrocity in which Iraq played absolutely no part. It was carried out largely by Saudis; the ringleader, a Saudi named Osama bin Laden, had found safe haven in Afghanistan. But before U.S. forces could hunt him down there, George W. Bush invaded Iraq again.

It seems that a combination of reckless ambitions, arrogance and a desire for retribution came together in that misbegotten drive to war. At the time, Americans still grieving over the death toll from 9/11 were hopped up on bloodlust, ready to seek revenge against any Muslim nation, whether or not it had sought to attack us. Democrats who should have known better — and that includes Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, both of whom were serving in the U.S. Senate — were afraid to counsel against war for fear that their political standing would be adversely affected.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who certainly knew better, lent his credibility to the lies that were told in support of that misadventure, one from which we have not yet extricated ourselves. Indeed, the toppling of Hussein and the resulting instability led to the rise of the Islamic State group, a faction of Sunni jihadists.

Given the mess in Iraq, you might think that our elected leaders would have learned some important lessons about the limits of our military might and the awful consequences of our hubris.

But maybe not.