Does anyone remember, back shortly after 9/11, when historians and pundits were wondering whether the world could get back on track to relative peace, or whether we were in for a giant clash of civilizations? Does anyone wonder anymore what it turned out to be?

I certainly don’t wonder anymore. We’re in for somewhere between a hundred and a thousand years of deep, mutual, cultural hatred, up to our elbows in ramshackle, rundown countries with permanent character disorders. What a freaking mess. The galling part is that it was not just preventable, but that we as a country were so hellbent on knocking down this particular hornets’ nest.

When I say “a freaking mess”, I mean, of course, Iraq. I’m not sure whether 9/11 was preventable, and afterward, it was totally justifiable to jump into Afghanistan, dismantle the spittle-flecked Taliban, and set down to work taking apart Al-Qaeda. Afghanistan was part of our problem already. Sometimes when a diaper stinks you have to change it, no matter how unpleasant the job, especially if the kid is sitting on your living room rug.

But this invasion of Iraq…

Before I get started, let me say that politically, I’m a centrist who leans Republican. I’m not a special interest group. I have not chosen to hardwire myself for permanent suspicion toward Republicans or Democrats, although I am registered Republican: I voted for Bush Sr. in 1992, for Dole in 1996, for McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries, but for Gore in 2000, when McCain didn’t win the primaries and Bush seemed like a worse choice than Gore. I’m Republican but not pro-Bush. Once Bush Jr. took office, though, I had reasonable confidence in the new administration, because despite my concerns about his maturity and character, I figured (hoped) that he surrounded himself with competent people.

So back to Iraq. When the Bush administration started agitating for the invasion of Iraq even though the dust hadn’t settled on Afghanistan yet, I figured they probably knew things that they couldn’t share with the public, that they had hard evidence of WMDs. WMDs are scary things. Plenty of justification, if we had the goods.

But as we know now, there weren’t any. If the administration had been given bad intelligence, false photos of WMDs or the like, that would be a certain kind of tragedy; but they didn’t have the evidence, only the way that Saddam was acting like he had something to hide. He wanted the world to think he had WMDs for the same reason that Harry Shearer’s character in This Is Spinal Tap put a potato in his pants. Bush himself was motivated by, apparently, family feud issues: when trying to explain the threat that Saddam posed to the world, he said, “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.” (That’s on the record, folks.) I can’t stand it. It means that Bush embroiled this great nation in the same kind of medieval tribalism and clan fighting that we find so backward and contemptible in the Arabic nations themselves.

And now we’ve caught their contagious mental illness. We’re going to continue to be stuck in this Mesopotamian tar-baby for a long, long time; I doubt if I’ll live to see the end of it. Sometimes I wonder if my children will live to see the end of it. And that’s all we need, folks: one complete generation that grows up understanding that there’s a Permanent Enemy that we can Blame All Our Problems On, and voilá, a perpetual madness machine. If you’re wondering where I got the 100-year estimate, it’s not mine; I heard it from Rep. Jim Kolbe at a town meeting after he returned from a visit to postwar Iraq. Other estimates I’ve heard are more like 1000 years.

The wretched dramas of Abu Ghraib, and Nicholas Berg’s ritual murder, are, I’m afraid, showing us the shape of a future to which we will wearily adapt. We must support this effort now that it’s started, even though it may have no end in sight. Look at Israel. I could be wrong and I truly hope I am. But as I look over the hedge that separates what might have been from what is, I wistfully wonder where we might be instead if McCain had won the 2000 Republican primaries.