Bush II's democracy crusade and Obama's embrace of the Arab Spring have unleashed and empowered forces less receptive to America's wishes and will than the despots and dictators deposed with our approval.

Obama has succeeded in descending even below George W. Bush in approval in the Arab world. It's minuscule, few percent.

If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.

Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.

No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world.

America has no vital interest in whose flag flies over Kosovo's capital, and no right to attack and kill Serb soldiers fighting on their own soil to preserve the territorial integrity of their own country,