U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry thinks Iraq can be saved with a new prime minister to take the place of Nouri al-Maliki. The new one would make friends with the alienated and hostile Sunni citizens that make up some 40 percent of the country's population, who in the past dictatorially ruled it, and were forced out of power and precedence by the ascendant Shiite majority. They can be convinced to forget all that, Kerry presumes — those who are not already members of the ISIL army, also known as the ISIS.

One must tell Kerry that it's too late. (He's the man who told us that he was going to fix up a two-state agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by next month.) Many other people in Washington have told the press about their equally unrealizable schemes for saving Iraq today: a new leadership, national reconciliation, appointment of Shiite, Druze and Turkman officials, a new parliament, a new and well-trained army, a national campaign drafted by the best American public relations agencies to convince Iraqis to love one another and look at their future with optimism. Or they want another American invasion.

The exhortations in Washington that President Barack Obama "do something" about the crises in the Middle East rest on the illusion that the United States already possesses the powers to which the Pentagon has aspired in its program to create a global system of regional commands that already cover Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Central Asia, the Pacific, and now finishing off with "Africa Command" — all with the means to deploy American strategic ascendancy in every corner of the world.