Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority.

The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.

Thompson never had any fire; thus, he didn't catch fire. He missed a darn good opportunity. The GOP race this time around is a contest to determine which candidate can be the default Republican nominee—the one who offends the least number of primary voters. Each of the major contenders alienates (or provokes concern among) large swaths of Republicans. Rudy Giuliani fancies gay rights and abortion rights (not gun rights). Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on social issues. John McCain is despised by Republican activists for having passed campaign reform legislation and for having questioned the Bush II tax cuts. Mike Huckabee's fundamentalism scares the country clubbers. Thompson, in theory, would appeal for each of the three main GOP constituencies.

Human nature is to spend everything you make. It takes discipline to save money and accumulate wealth, and most people do not have it. When house prices were rising, every homeowner suddenly faced with a dramatic increase in their yearly “income,” if they drank the Kool Aid and learned to view appreciation as income. Many, many people did what human nature would compel them to do — they took this free money and spent it.

It went on for so long, it became part of their identity. These people actually believed they were rich. The influx of free money through appreciation was considered an entitlement for homeowners; something that would go on forever.

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

In recent years, the antiabortion movement successfully put the nitty-gritty details of abortion procedures on public display, increasing the belief that abortion is serious business and that some societal involvement is appropriate. Those who are pro-choice have not convinced America that we support a public discussion of the moral dimensions of abortion. Likewise, we haven't convinced people that we are the ones actually doing things to make it possible for women to avoid needing abortions.

Among the tiny percentage of Americans who do contribute large amounts of money to political campaigns (the number who give a thousand dollars or more to any candidate hovers around one tenth of one percent of the population), Hollywood contributors are almost alone in not trying to buy themselves anything so concrete as a tax break or a watered-down regulation. Although the entertainment industry itself does have corporate PACs, which do the industry's bidding and spread its wealth accordingly, most of the contributions handed out by individual members of the entertainment industry are ideological money that buys them nothing.

One thing I do like about this debate is that its freewheeling, hot emotion better reveals the candidates' various poles, rather than allowing them to stay relentlessly on message and project uncomplicated selves. Take Obama -- the last hour and a half has captured for me both why I find him frustrating and why I admire him.

Early in the debate, he sounded like it was Hillary's world and he just lives in it. Too many of his responses began with "Hillary, that's not what I said," which is both huffy in style and bereft in substance, since it turns the argument to semantics and quibbles over quotations that can't be fact-checked up on the stage, rather than what everybody actually meant.