In my mind, I see a helicopter hovering over the embassy building

with frightened citizens, many locals would would be executed as "collaborators" are struggling to be evacuated.

Yes, Baghdad, above the super expensive and largest embassy in the world.

No, it is not Obama's fault, but it is happening while he is in office.

And no, we don't want to send troops back to Iraq. And, frankly, the same is already repeated in Afghanistan where the Taliban has taken over.

One has to wonder whether anyone in the Cheney administration ever bothered to at least talk to historians.

The whole Middle East, except for Israel, has been and still is a collections of tribes. It was after WWI when the British and the French arbitrarily drew state lines and attempted to install the sons of Sharif Hussein as kings in Syria and Trans Jordan. (When the French evicted the new king from Syria, he got Iraq as a consolation prize).

From Avi Shlaim's book: "The delineation of Iraq's border was arbitrary calculated to suit Britain's own political, strategic and commercial interests. The borders took no account of the aspiration of the Kurds to national self-determination or of the division of the rest of the population along religious lines into Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims. Originally two Ottoman provinces, Basra and Baghdad, composed Iraq. Later Britain added Mosul, the oil rich province in the north, dashing the Kurds hope."

And, it removed the oil-rich province of Kuwait from Iraq. Hussein was not that crazy when he invaded Kuwait in 1990..

And the agreement tore a part of Syria to establish Lebanon with "Christian majority." No longer true.

Thus, from Lebanon and Syria, Iraq and Jordan and in Afghanistan and Pakistan there are factions and tribes fighting with each other and the rest of us are supposed to make sense of this?

The only difference from 100 years ago, is that these factions are now armed to the teeth, including weapons of mass destruction.

And we are now dealing with a new group —known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham ISIS—that isn't a threat only to Iraq and Syria. It seeks to impose its vision of a single radical Islamist state stretching from the Mediterranean coast of Syria through modern Iraq, the region of the Islamic Caliphates established in the seventh and eighth centuries.

And into this wasp nest Cheney et al walked waiting for the welcoming masses, the victory marches that never materialized.

Worse, we stayed there for all these years. And it is possible - I am no military strategist - that we lost any gains in Afghanistan because we so quickly sent troops to Iraq.

For many years, we had secular strong men ruling many of these nations: the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, Assad in Syria, even Ghadaffi in Libya. But once all of them, except for Assad were thrown, chaos and killing have ensued.

I was glad that Saddam Hussein was removed. But once he was, we should have transferred power to the local Iraqis, under the control of an international force, yes, including Germany and France who were not in the "coalition of the willing."

We should have had an international force composed of soldiers from other Arab countries who at least spoke the same language though one has to wonder whether the Sunni vs. Shiite may have made it difficult.

Instead, we built a huge fortress and called it the U.S. embassy. And we had Paul Bremer who was the governor of Iraq, or something, without knowing the first thing about the country. He started by prohibiting any former public service employees if they were members of the Ba'ath party. As if they had a choice.

Mccain is huffing and puffing. And it won't surprise me if some Republicans will call for impeaching the president, again. But the reality is that just as it happened in Vietnam, and for the Russians in Afghanistan - we entered a war with no idea what it would take. No, not just exist strategy, but purpose and implementation. Mostly, we had no idea of the history of the region.