Sen. Rand Paul is spot on. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was created and is fueled by Mr. Paul's lobotomized neoconservative rivals.

In other words, to paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo about the Vietnam War, Mr. Paul's foreign policy detractors have met the enemy, and they are them!

With the predictability of the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, power vacuums in primitive political cultures give birth to extremists — religious or otherwise. There are no exceptions. Ruthlessness and fanaticism flourish in a Hobbesian state of nature.

Israel gave birth to Hamas by crippling the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat's dominant Fatah faction.

Hezbollah emerged from a power vacuum in Lebanon.

Al Qaeda and Taliban were created by a power vacuum in Afghanistan following the ouster of Soviet troops in 1989.

Iran's radical Shiite regime is the offspring of the power vacuum created by the 1979 overthrow of the shah.

Despite the obvious, Mr. Paul's deluded Republican opponents bugled for the overthrow of Iraq's secular President Saddam Hussein in 2003 heedless of the power vacuum that would ensue. Saddam was a fierce antagonist of Iran's ruling mullahs, against whom he had warred (with U.S. support) for eight years, 1980-88. No-fly zones and sanctions had crippled Saddam's capacity to threaten the United States. But the neocons insisted on an invasion and the obliteration of Saddam and the ruling Baath Party to save the world from imaginary weapons of mass destruction and to erect a model democracy for the region. After Saddam's ouster and death, Iraq predictably became convulsed by internecine warfare and strife between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds featuring an unstable and extremist sectarian central government allied with Iran. A splinter group of al Qaeda (which itself was armed and trained by the United States to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan), ISIS was born by a U.S.-generated power vacuum in Iraq. ISIS also took root and grew from a complementary power vacuum in Syria, which neocons fortified by urging the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and training Sunni rebels.