I'm in sync with reality when I say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake and a disaster on many levels. Did it cause Radical Islam? of course not. Did it empower Radical Islam? Yes it most certainly did. Did any good come of it? Hell no.
You said it was the root cause and the invasion empowered radical Islam. How? The failures of Maliki and Obama led to the vacuum, not the invasion that smashed Saddam and had stabilized Iraq until Obama goofed it up with his indifference.
Think for a moment what the world would have been like if after defeating Germany and Japan we had built a few schools, trained a few former NAZIS and ‘japs’, then supplied them with weapons and walked away....
If we must go to war - - the losers should be handed a Constitution when they formally surrender... based on the one we gave Japan... If we don’t have what it takes to do that then we need to stay the hell out of their problems.