We have all known for a very long time now that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, nor did his regime have a direct connection to the September 11th attack. The casus belli for the second Iraq war was patently false. Threats of mushroom clouds, rumors of yellow cake uranium, and hysterical claims of aluminum tubes to build a uranium centrifuge were all hollow. It turns out that sanctions and inspections really had de-fanged Hussein, at least in terms of his ability to threaten other nations on that scale.
But sometimes you have to keep working to stay right, lest they take it away from you.
As months turned to years, new talking points emanated from the right wing echo chamber. The rationale for the invasion became a moving target. As one excuse after another was revealed to be a sham, each of them submerged into a quiet oblivion, and new reasons continuously popped up, like an intellectual game of Whac-A-Mole.
One of the most onerous was the so-called Reverse Domino Theory, an idea so insidious that it was beyond two-faced. It had no less than three hoary visages.
The first face was a false lover bearing empty promises, the assertion that democracy was waiting to spread throughout the Middle East, if only we would show them how by invading and rebuilding Iraq.
The second face was a growling scary monster, the baseless assertion that if we left Iraq 
too soon, fundamentalist Islamists would gain power not only there, but throughout much of the region.
The third face was the wizard, conniving behind the curtain. Neo-Conservatives had developed a calculated strategy to rid the region of governments with a history of hostility toward us, a half-dozen former Soviet-client states leftover from the Cold War. First Iraq, then Syria, eventually all the way to Iran. Knock those dominos down one at a time if need be.
If the third face remained obscured, and the second face was not brandished until things started to go horribly wrong, then it was the first face, the empty promise of democracy, that they tried to charm us with in the beginning. And it is that face, its phony smile frozen in time, which now mocks the neo-Cons. For while they thought they were directing history back in 2001, today it is clear that the storyline has taken an unexpected turn and cut them out altogether.
The neo-Conservative plot had holes from the start. War advocates assured us that invading and re-building Iraq would be a relatively simple affair: Iraqi women would blow kisses, men would sing our praises, and children would sit on the shoulders of GIs 
as American tanks rolled through the streets of Baghdad; it would be like Paris in 1945, only hotter.
A reverse domino theory would ensue. Raise up that one grateful domino, and the rest will stand up. Invade Iraq, build a democratic state, and freedom would emerge across the Middle East, taking down despots and kings, and remaking the region in our own image.
It turns out they were half-right. But boy, were they leading with the wrong half.
Nearly a decade after the Iraq invasion, the region is indeed finally ripe for revolution. It seems that people were tired of monarchs and dictators after all. But alas, the revolutionary spark didn’t come from an American military invasion, based on false claims, against an Arab nation. Go figure.
Now that the story has begun to unfold, we must shake our heads and ask: Who in their right minds believed that the United States, considered by many Arabs to be an arrogant imperial power, could manifest democratic revolutions throughout the Middle East by using flimsy excuses to invade a neighboring Arab nation? In retrospect, such advocates now look provincial, ignorant, and foolhardy.
After all, what great revolution in the name of freedom has ever come about through the 
supposedly beneficent invasion of a neighboring oppressor?
France? Haiti? Eastern Europe? India? Our own?
None, of course.
Instead, as in all cases, the revolutionary spark came from within.
The recent uprisings in the Middle East are a stunning testament to the contagion of freedom, and a reminder that what rises from within always rings truer and stands stronger than what is foisted from without. These rebellions offer us a hopeful promise of what the future can be, while reminding us of what the past should not have been. They are one more example of how the war in Iraq was catastrophically misguided, and one more second chance for humanity to rectify its mistakes and move in a better direction.
As of yet, there is no way to tell exactly what will come of these revolutions. Though in some cases, it is hard to imagine that what follows will be any worse than the brutal dictators, some of whom we supported, who terrorized their nations.
For now, we can only hope for the best, and have faith that our government will make 
wise diplomatic maneuvers instead of ill-considered military blunders. But in the meantime, let the record show that what started in Tunisia has spread across an entire region of the globe. And that the revolutionary spirit thus far has been the will of the people.
The nations of the Middle East are not ours to break, but theirs to remake.