Just because America has the most sophisticated, well-stocked arsenal of killing devices ever assembled on God's sorry-assed earth does not mean America is powerful, unless we look at power as simply the ability to kill adversaries.
Real power is the ability to get one's adversaries to negotiate mutually beneficial agreeements, something that will never happen through the blunt use of military force. Bush and the neocons use military force as a substitute for the tough gritty work of actually negotiating with disagreeable, fractious nations that nonetheless have some measure of power to affect us. The ultimate weakness of the neocon ideal (now foolishly adopted by much of the American public) is the playground bully approach to international affairs. If you don't agree to our terms, we'll beat you up.
The important lesson of the Iraq war, for all its failed noble objectives, is that our war leaves America in a much worse position than we were in before we went in. While Saddam may have been a terrible adversary, untrustworthy and unsavory, the challenge for the US was to find a way to negotiate with or around him. Now that we have cleared him out we find we are still faced with an almost impossible negotiating task, and under far worse circumstances than Saddam ever posed. There may well be a place where application of our military might would be effective, but this is not it.
Iraq is the wind that blows the curtain of OZ open, it exposes the myth of American hyperpower. With all our technical wizardry and our power to kill, we wish we could simply skip over the rough and tumble human aspect of power, operate the levers of power, charm the world into believing our power to be inviolable, have them simply bow down before us, throwing flowers and sweets. It is a childish wish. It is an utterly mistaken idea. While some might bow before us as our tanks rumble through their streets and our jets roar overhead and our shock and awe bombs crackle on the night sky, most will find a way to fight back. Eventually it always boils down to negotiation, finding a way to coexist amid competing interests.
Making war on Iraq has done nothing to resolve issues, it has merely rearranged conditions. And they are demonstrably worse as a direct result of making war.
War is the problem. Not Iraqi intransigence. Not failed strategies. Not bad intelligence. War. War waged by an American public intoxicated with the Myth of Hyperpower. What good is war?