Delusions of Grandeur:

"Iraqis may not have full sovereignty yet, but America needs to understand that Iraqis, not Americans, are already sovereign over events there.

America would be a better nation-builder if it acknowledged this, but its history does not encourage humility. During the D-Day celebrations, the old newsreel footage of dusty GIs riding into Rome and Paris in 1944 burnished America's incorrigible mythology of its own omnipotence. In Iraq, even the locals succumbed to it, expecting that the world's most powerful country must be able to get water, electricity and security running in no time. It was a rude surprise to discover how chaotic, incompetent and downright violent the godlike liberators turned out to be...

The signal illusion from which America has to awake in Iraq, and everywhere else, is that it serves God's providence or (for those with more secular beliefs) that it is the engine of history. In Iraq, America is not the maker of history, but its plaything. In the region at large, America is not the hegemon, but the hesitant shaper of forces it barely understands."