(The planes from that aircraft carrier had only recently dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq.)  There, standing under a White House-produced banner that read "Mission Accomplished," the president dramatically announced that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" and hailed "the arrival of a new era."

Today, we know that those combat operations had barely begun.  Almost 12 years later, with the Obama administration pursuing a bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State, they have yet to end. On only one thing was President Bush right: with the invasion of Iraq, a new era had indeed been launched.  His top officials and their neoconservative allies imagined the moment as the coronation of a new order in the Middle East, the guarantee of another American half-century or more of domination. .