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With the news this week that Falluja in Anbar Province had fallen into the hands of Al Qaeda-affiliated Sunni insurgents, you can only shake your head at the havoc left behind after more than a decade of war in Iraq. We removed the Sunni-dominated Baathist police state of Saddam Hussein and replaced it with… What? A Shiite-dominated government that has proven to be both ineffective and corrupt? With the departure of American troops, the security situation has steadily deteriorated and violence is now commonplace.

For Americans, especially the great majority of us who were not directly touched by serving in Iraq or having family and friends that did, this is just another series of unseen events in a far-off land. It is an Iraqi problem now. The short-term attention span of the American public allows us to forget the warning that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave the Administration in the run-up to the 2003 invasion: “You break it, you own it. It’s the Pottery Barn rule.”

After smashing the pottery, we have gotten away with running out of the store.

Oh, please don’t ask about WMDs or Iraqi oil; it’s too painful to consider.