The bad thing about reality is that it keeps intruding on our pleasant fiction.

The last seven years have been nothing if not a titanic battle of wills pitting verbal chaff and the willing suspension of logic versus ambivalent reality. One side of the political spectrum simply insists reality doesn’t matter: The iron-clad laws of supply and demand don’t apply in medicine. Endless manipulations of temperature model predictions demonstrate something that real, measured temperatures refuse to reveal. People that break into your home and take up residence in your basement, demanding breakfast, lunch and dinner have a right to be there, solely because they want what you have worked for.

But the most egregious disregard for logic and the most basic understanding of human behavior has demonstrated itself in this children’s version of foreign policy. Although this is but one facet of the left’s vast parade of ignorance, it is the most immediate and dangerous manifestation of their childish buffoonery. Their refusal to accept basic human nature as demonstrated throughout human history has doomed hundreds of thousands of humans, if not millions, to death and oppression beneath all of the utterly predictable outcomes enabled by the left of the United States. From Korea to Vietnam to 1990s Iraq to what will happen in Afghanistan, the left’s record of turning hope into ashes and death is tracking with Stalin’s purges, only in other people’s countries, so it’s OK.

Iraq is a great current example of the death and destruction that weakness and the policy of covering your eyes until the bad man goes away will produce.

From 2007-2008 I was privileged to represent the United States on the ground helping establish the Iraqi Air Force as a strong, moral, effective fighting organization. I was constantly working with people whom we had shot down, blown up or tried to kill in myriad other ways. They called us the “Friendly Side.”

It turned out to be the most informative year of my professional life. I was so moved by how positive the experience was that I wrote a book, called “A Flowershop in Baghdad.” It offers my perspective of the exceptional nature of this country, and the effect of that on the very people we had invaded.

When I left in 2008, we were gently grooming the next generation of Iraqis to take over from the many corrupt, but mostly benign, senior leaders. After all, spending your entire 40-50-60 years under a brutal government where any word could result in your violent death is not a great way to establish responsibility, accountability and ethical behavior. It establishes craven, unquestioning, personal loyalty to whoever is in power at the moment. Precisely the type of behavior that leads to, well, the Iraqis of the 1990s. A society where trust, ethics and honesty were liabilities that could get you killed.

But we couldn’t just imprison all of those who were simply corrupt or buffoons that used their personal connections to advance; only the really dangerous needed to be removed. We would have to be top cover for the younger generation until they were the decision makers. And that takes time. Time that had already been paid for with so many young American lives, but that an impatient and ill-informed American electorate refused to give.

After repeated warnings about the consequences of abandoning the Middle East without leaving even a fraction of the military who are now in Germany, or Japan, or Korea, the left proudly crowed about leaving a “…strong… stable Iraq.” Only when it came time to fulfill childish campaign promises, no matter what the cost to the people we had just liberated, no matter what the cost extracted from the fallen, could the American left be counted on to keep their word. Skulking away over the graves of the fallen counted as victory until reality intruded, as it always does, into the left’s make-believe world.

The evil that had been restrained by the calm, solid American presence started to emerge. The warnings that the grownups had articulated started to come true. And the left, true to form, looked for someone to blame. The ownership of the decision to leave suddenly had nothing to do with the Democrats. No longer was it “Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq; I did.” Now, someone else did it. And then, some faceless, nameless adversary (that had been identified in 2007) materialized out of nowhere. And when the threat transitioned from the “JV” team to something bigger and more lethal due to Democrat policies and actions, it was the Republicans’ fault.

Then the hole that was left by the Democrats was filled, utterly predictably, first by chaos, and then by Vladimir Putin. He didn’t seem to care about lofty phrases, reset buttons, or the fact that we had a woman secretary of state and the first black president. Those very progressive, leftist markers are only important to other racists and sexists. What he smelled was weakness, a fundamental un-seriousness, and opportunity. And our childish electorate gave it to him. As it turns out, he may be the least lethal and destructive option in the Middle East as we have abandoned it, convinced our president’s “difference” from his predecessors is enough to maintain order.

The Iraqis had asked to purchase AH-64 Apaches, similar to ones that we have sold to their neighbors. We said it would take at least three years. We held up delivering their F-16s that they bought and paid for, as it was too dangerous to deliver the vehicles that would make them safer. Ironically, some of the class of young Iraqis that I had helped train were waiting to jump in those cockpits, and fly those missions. And as far as the combat helicopters we wouldn’t sell? The Russians delivered them with crew, ground support equipment and maintenance people in 10 months.

The reality is that now, in many places where Americans died to liberate the people, either Russian or ISIS boots are treading. The Iraqis are bewildered by this abandonment by the strongest military in the world, and are struggling to maintain a belief in the “friendly side.” At least one of the young men who risked his life daily to learn and be mentored by us, struggling to become an Iraqi pilot, now thinks that the U.S. may have created ISIS as a hammer to fracture the Middle East. He cites “Hard Choices,” the memoir of Hillary Clinton, as a source.

Imagine a Middle East that has a strong Iraq, aligned as partners with the United States; where Egypt has a US-friendly, progressive, democratically elected leader; where UAE, Qatar and Jordan remain the partners that George Bush established and nurtured. ISIS would be a dirty collection of prisoners scattered throughout the Middle East.

Since they were never notorious, there would be no draw from other countries to support them. Al-Qaida would still be attempting to sow mayhem, but with the increasingly competent Arab forces, still mentored by their American (and traditionally NATO) allies, the terrorists could only cause local heartache until the populations they depend on tired of their chaos, and snuffed them out.

Syria would still be a mess, but we wouldn’t have to desperately choose to give $500 million between mostly bad people and really bad people, none of whom we really know much about. Libya may have turned out differently if stabilizing influences of other Arab countries helped generate a more peaceful power transition.

Examples matter. A unified Arab presence would be restraining Hamas, isolating Iran, and supporting (perhaps silently) Israel. There was a golden opportunity purchased with better men or women than you or I to make that happen.

And then the American elections of 2008 happened.

And we lost it all.

But a guy can dream, can’t he?

Mike Banzet, a 1986 graduate of Flathead High School, is a retired major in the U.S. Air Force and the author of “A Flowershop in Baghdad.”  He now lives with his family in Ohio.