The Pentagon recently released a report that said, "Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq." That's from the Pentagon!

One of the best and most important pieces I've read in quite some time discusses how conditions within a country are what give rise to the worst kind of dictators and tyrants. The Hitlers of the world never just sort of popped up out of nowhere and decided to take power. Instead, the conditions within such countries were ripe for such a person to become popular and thereafter take control to conduct atrocities.

The piece I'm referring to was posted by the blog Legal Fiction. Below are some key segments:

What these individuals are capable of, though, are some nasty terrorist attacks that could kill a lot of people. But the answer to that is to go find these individuals and arrest or kill them — as opposed to invading countries and then justifying that with kindergarten level stories about how the invasion is necessary to prevent the impending return of the Caliphate.
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Bush is making a common error by looking at the rise of Lenin and Hitler backwards. He’s treating Hitler and Lenin as the causes of great political and societal change. In reality, they are reflections of it.
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The question is what underlying historical and cultural forces made the rise of Lenin possible. Same deal with Hitler. What are the underlying forces that made Hitler possible....If Lenin died in exile, there would have been another “Lenin” because the underlying forces were in place to create one. Same deal with Hitler....What made Lenin and Hitler politically viable was not their evilness, but the state of their respective countries. In other words, the underlying material and cultural conditions made the public receptive to their message.
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To prevent Lenins and Hitlers, you have to prevent the conditions that give rise to Hitlers and Lenins....The problem though is the neocons' complete disconnect with any sort of empirical or objective reality regarding the effectiveness of their means. For instance, it should be more than clear by now that regime change and democracy-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun undermines our broader (and to an extent, shared) goals.
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Our own policies — ostensibly in the name of fighting terrorism — are giving rise to the very conditions that gave rise to the Hitlers and Lenins of history....Iraq is essentially a failed state caught in a destabilizing civil war that is only going to get worse. On top of that, Muslims have endured cultural humiliation in the face of Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, etc.

The mix of instability, military impotence, and humiliation has proven in the past to be a volatile one. That’s why it’s no accident that Hezbollah or Sadr’s militia has so much support right now. It has less to do with Sadr and Nasrallah as individual agents of History and everything to do with the conditions these individuals have found themselves in.

Exactly why the invasion of Iraq has made us less safe, now and in the future. It has laid the fertile foundation for a future Lenin or Hitler to arise from the brutal chaos.

Thanks Bush & Co. for manipulating us into a $500 bil. unnecessary war that will ultimately be the root cause for more terrorism and violence wrought across the globe. For that reason alone, this "president" is the worst in history.