I was at a church meeting the other day and a pastor mentioned the PraiseNet to those in attendance, so I interrupted him. See, he’d mentioned the PraiseNet as though everyone in the room knew what it was. Truthfully, few church folk here in Colorado Springs have any idea what the PraiseNet is, even people we’ve told about it in great detail. But people don’t like looking dumb or uniformed, so nobody’s going to stop the pastor and say, “Hey, what’s a PraiseNet?” They’re just going to nod and let him keep talking, perhaps hoping to glean some understanding of it from context. The PraiseNet is Some Thing Some Where Out There in another place. It has no impact on their lives and flies well beneath the radar of nice folks who barely know how to turn a PC on. Talking about it is an utter waste of time, as this is a generation that is simply not motivated to embrace the Internet or anything on it.

And this is, concisely, what has been wrong with the president’s Iraq policy from its very inception. He is selling the Iraqi people democracy. Freedom is a product they neither understand nor particularly want. One Iraqi man said, “Under Saddam, we had security but no freedom. Now we have neither.”

It seems to me that the president assumed that, once we toppled Saddam, Iraq would, virtually overnight, turn into Cleveland. Cleveland of Arabia. With casinos and luxury condos going up; an island of stability where the US could maintain air bases indefinitely, shoring up our Middle East influence and keeping rogue states like Iran in check. It is, actually, a noble aspiration but it is a childish and naïve one as well. It is the ideal of a man who slept through his Social Studies class and who therefore knows nothing about history.

The polite nods and glazed eyes exhibited by the church folk as the pastor told them about the PraiseNet are exactly the kind of confused expressions we should have anticipated from the Iraqi people when we rolled in there and started blowing up the place. American-style democracy is simply an alien concept to them. Rather than embrace that freedom, rather than coalesce as a united, sovereign nation, even a child could have told the president that, the moment our soldiers took out the Iraqi thugs, the nation would collapse into chaos. Groups of Iraqis fighting other groups, arguing like children, the Iraqi government involved in petty squabbling and, yes, complaining about the very U.S. that put them in power.

In many ways, the Iraqis act, in fact, just like church folk. Arguing over stupid stuff, grabbing at the money, unwilling to give even an inch. It’s shameful and stupid, and it is, at the end of the day, the main reason we should pull our troops out immediately and go home. The U.S. government is sacrificing thousands of lives and spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars refereeing a sandbox fight between children. None of this should have come as a surprise to the most powerful man on the planet. The president should have seen this coming. After all, everyone else did.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, last week General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, delivered a report to Congress that fairly endorsed the president’s Iraq policy, while recommending a token drawdown of approximately 30,000 troops—the approximate number of troops the president added under his “troop surge” initiative. Which, basically, leaves us where we started—with 130,000 troops stuck in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

With both Democrats and Republicans screaming for sanity, the president continues to ignore both friend and foe in his stubborn refusal to accept any criticism of his handling of the Iraq war or to admit the policy is deeply flawed. The president continues to press forward with no clear objective and no exit strategy, defying Congress and the will of the American people and, frankly, common sense as he marches blithely down the road to hell. Critics on both sides of the political aisle agree the president’s current strategy is, essentially, to hand the problem off to the next president rather than offer any clear line of sight to victory or retreat. Petraeus, a respected and trusted leader, has suffered the undermining of his integrity as few people in America trust the honesty of his report, most especially given that the majority of commanding generals to retire from this war have subsequently come out against it.

The president has a deadly combination of stubbornness and naiveté. His goal was a stable and democratic Iraq, which was naïve in the sense that the president clearly doesn’t understand history. Installing American-style democracy on an Islamic nation ruled by a ruthless dictator is an enormous challenge. Destabilizing that country would surely lead to chaos, and the president should have seen that.

Now all he talks about is al Qaeda, which misses the point that the president’s war is what gave terrorists a foothold in Iraq in the first place. The president’s rationale for continuing a dysfunctional policy is that, if we don’t, al Qaeda will win. Which is a mess he himself created.

The only way to win in Iraq is to fast forward a thousand years, bringing the mindset of the indigenous people from the tenth century into the twenty-first. This is a culture that solves its problems with bullets and car bombs. Set up all the voting booths you like, blood runs easily and cheaply in Iraq.

My friends are over there. My family is over there. This is a shameful, terrible business that points out one of the enduring flaws of the American political system: the absolute power of the president to wage war. The ongoing spinelessness of the Democratic party, our politicians’ willingness—as a whole—to continue placing politics before the lives of our young men and women in the military, and the American public’s disgraceful ignorance of what’s going on—as we go shopping and to the movies and so forth—adds up to a dark period in the history of this country.

We deserve more from our leaders. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines deserve more from us. It’s not that nobody can stop the president from his obsession, it’s that we, as a people, are simply unwilling to. And that’s the saddest part of all.