Worldview: A bipartisan effort doomed our venture in Iraq

While Democrats and Republicans squabble in Congress, they deserve bipartisan credit for one stunning achievement: the defeat of the United States in Iraq.

The willful blindness and strategic stupidity of the Bush administration led us into the Iraq war and the postwar disaster. The 2007 troop surge and Gen. David Petraeus created a slim hope that Iraq might yet become stable. That hope was dashed by the mistakes of the Obama team.

As U.S. troops finish their pullout by year's end, no fine farewells can disguise the sad realities on the ground. Iraq today is a broken country where sectarian strife is reemerging and al-Qaeda is seeking a comeback. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki acts like an autocrat and marginalizes Iraqi moderates. He also depends for his political survival on Tehran's blessing.

Indeed, the paramount victors to emerge from our Iraq misadventure are the ayatollahs of Iran.

The lion's share of blame for this debacle rests with the Bush team, which ignored the likely consequences of the war. Wishful thinking became a substitute for strategy; real Mideast expertise was rebuffed. (This tendency is all too alive in the current, careless rhetoric about attacking Iran emanating from several Republican presidential hopefuls.)

Bush officials believed ousting Saddam Hussein would lead to pro-American regimes from Baghdad to Tehran. I will never forget Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz telling me in November 2002 that postwar Iraq would resemble post-World War II France, where we liberated the country and left.

Instead, White House ignorance about Iraq - and the decision to disband its army - produced a security collapse in the country, a bloody sectarian war, and the emergence of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

When Bush officials finally started acting as occupiers, they set up a governing system that encouraged representation by religious and ethnic parties. This system ensured that Shiite religious groups would dominate Iraq's political system and played right into the hands of Iran.

Fast-forward to Barack Obama's election in 2008. Petraeus had defanged Sunni insurgents and new Prime Minister Maliki had cracked down on murderous, pro-Iranian Shiite militias. There was a chance, albeit slim, that a new nationalist Iraqi politics could emerge that would keep Iran at bay. Serious and smart U.S. diplomacy was essential to make that happen.