What a difference 40 months made.

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush vented the rage into which American grief had turned in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. This “anger” over the jihadist attacks, he proclaimed, had duly become “resolution.” The resulting admonition was twofold. To the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had knowingly given safe haven to al-Qaeda as it executed a series of terror strikes of which 9/11 was the culmination, Bush warned that they would either hand over Osama bin Laden and his henchmen or “share in their fate,” which he implied would be deadly. More stark, though, was the ultimatum he presented to the wider world: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

By January 20, 2005, in his second inaugural address, with initial months of invincible combat effectiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan already giving way to what would become years of futile sharia-democracy building, Bush presented hubris as “common sense” — which, in conjunction with “events,” he rationalized into “one conclusion”: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

This was untenable, then as now. Twenty years after the Iraq invasion, however, one assertion still rings true, an admonition for our own political class’s introspection: In the absence of a convincing demonstration that “the survival of liberty in our land” truly is imperiled, the American people are not disposed to expend American blood to expand freedom throughout the world.

In truth, it was ever thus.

I was on what passed as the front line of the government’s phlegmatic response to the jihadist war on the United States that was effectively declared by the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 — eight years before that complex was destroyed on 9/11, and a decade before U.S. forces invaded Iraq. As an anti-terrorism prosecutor, I witnessed — indeed, helped implement — the folly of treating a profound national-security threat as though it were a crime wave. From overseas safe havens where our agencies could not investigate and the writ of our courts did not run, networks of militant Islamists plotted mass-murder attacks on our homeland and U.S. installations around the world. Until 9/11, we responded with subpoenas and indictments — or sometimes not at all, as in al-Qaeda’s October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden.

The Bush doctrine in its post-9/11 proclamation — you’re with us or with our enemies — was thus a vital course correction. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I believed in that doctrine. I still believe in that doctrine.

The case that jihadists had aligned with a monstrous government was weaker as to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq than as to other fundamentalist Islamic regimes, in particular Shiite Iran. But that did not mean the Iraq case was nonexistent or trivial. For Bush-doctrine adherents, the ousting of Saddam’s Baathists seemed at the time to be just the next tile to fall in what would surely be a line of dominos. It was not clear to those who backed military action in furtherance of American national security that the Bush doctrine was about to transmogrify into a deeply flawed sociology project.

The claim that there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is untrue. This should be obvious from the ease with which al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, took the lead in the deadly anti-American insurgency that quite intentionally instigated Iraq’s internecine bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites. After the Gulf War, Saddam had been open — though cautiously so — to collaborations with anti-American jihadists. When the Clinton administration targeted a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in an ineffectual foray of missile attacks after al-Qaeda’s August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in east Africa, it was due to intelligence indicating that the plant was a joint chemical-weapons venture involving operatives of both Baghdad and Osama bin Laden’s network.

The jihadist connection was vital to the rationale that the invasion of Iraq was, rather than a preemptive war of choice, was part and parcel of the so-called War on Terror. The Bush administration, however, chose to place all its chips on the “slam dunk” evidence (in the estimation of the CIA’s then-director, George Tenet) that Saddam was amassing weapons of mass destruction. The failure to substantiate this allegation mortally wounded the Bush administration, as congressional Democrats turned against the war with the vengeance of their manic “Bush lied and people died” base. To the mortification of its supporters, the administration, having been humiliated on WMD, shrank from defending itself on the nexus between the war in Iraq and the war against jihadists — cementing the conceit that there was none.

What was left was the delusion that the United States could democratize Iraq and that this in turn would render America safer. This was the bitterest pill of all for a U.S. government prosecutor who had tried terrorists and thus proved their animating ideology in court years before 9/11. The core of fundamentalist Islam is submission to sharia, Allah’s law that determines the societal framework. As interpreted in much of Iraq and the Muslim Middle East, sharia is an authoritarian and discriminatory code that brooks no dissent and inflicts brutal hudud penalties. It regards Western institutions and mores with implacable hostility. Good American intentions to improve Muslim lives were beside the point. The democracy project was doomed from the start.

It was also a boon for Iran in Iraq. As the mullahs made inroads in the insurgency, the Iraqi public demanded an end to American occupation. Outraged by the Iraqis’ ingratitude, Americans turned decisively against further involvement. When President Barack Obama exploited this climate to withdraw (in accordance with premature terms to which Bush had agreed with Iraq’s teetering, Tehran-friendly government), ISIS arose from the seedlings of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Its conquests captured a vast swath of Iraq and Syria until President Donald Trump reintroduced enough forces to rout the caliphate. To this day, though, there remain around 3,500 American troops in the area, a testament to its enduring instability.

The legacy of the Iraq War is deep American cynicism about our government’s assurances that commitments of our troops further America’s interests. It is a dangerous cynicism. Skepticism does not alter our reality. We have enemies — terror networks and great powers — who mean us harm. To the extent the Iraq experience undermines our will to act decisively in our defense, we are vulnerable.