Conservative critics of Barack Obama's foreign policy are right: it's vague when articulated and contradictory when enacted. He refuses to act decisively and tunes out the rhetorical bravado of foreign leaders. And if the United States is to avoid another round of pointless bloodshed in the Middle East, that's the kind of foreign policy our country needs right now. Indeed, it's the one we want.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Mitt Romney added to the existing critique of Obama as feckless-bordering-on-fey. The president, his former challenger asserted, was not just ineffectual in his stance toward Iraq and Syria – he was also ignorant. The president, said the former one-term governor of Massachusetts, has "repeatedly underestimated the threats" posed by chaos in Iraq – or "Russia or Assad or Isis or al-Qaida itself".

The terror that has gripped Iraq over the past week is, no doubt, horrific. When militants claim they've massacred 1,700 soldiers, it would be foolish not to give yourself options by moving an aircraft carrier here and toughening up an embassy there – which Obama has done, actively, not through "neglect" or "a nap", as still more critics claimed over the weekend.

But let's remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn't by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was by overestimating it.

"Overestimating" may even be too generous. We created a threat when there was none, not out of whole cloth so much as a web of pride, avarice and insecurity. Obama's haters on the right – and maybe even some formerly hawkish apologists on the left – need a refresher course on just how much of the Iraq invasion hinged on ego and imagined taunts. It wasn't all about revenge for Daddy's loss. Don't forget the perception in the Bush White House that the president was "weak" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the frozen look as he read from My Pet Goat, the hours of hop-scotching around the country, out of sight, as the carnage and panic continued to unfold.

It was Bush's improvisation of macho defiance – in those moments following his 9/11 lapse into visible doubt – that created the blueprint for these wars that have refused to end. The declaration that the US would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored them" was made in a speech given less than twelve hours after the first tower was hit. Today, we call that formulation the Bush Doctrine, though anything so hastily conceived hardly merits the title of "doctrine".

Governments are supposed to be slower to act than people. They are supposed to filter our instinctive desires, not jump on them. It is probably not a coincidence that support for the death penalty in America is at a record low as well. The state's power to take a life is democracy's most dubious gift. We have learned that the hard way.

That the Bush administration misled the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq is now all but common knowledge; what we talk about less is why Americans were moved so easily from concern about possible attacks from overseas into almost pornographic nationalism.

Clearly, we were intoxicated by some heady perfume of testosterone and saddle leather that pulled along George W Bush by the nose. When the Iraq war began, nearly 80% of Americans thought it was a good idea. Almost as many approved of how the president was handling it. Irrational exuberance is not just for markets.

How we have sobered since then!

A record high number of people (53%) believe that America is "less powerful and less important than it was ten years ago"; the percentage of those who believe that America should "mind its own business internationally" (52%) is the highest it’s been in 50 years. And support for specific foreign interventions is as wobbly as the reasoning for undertaking them: only 25% of Americans supported air strikes on Syria; just 14% approved of a Nato-led military action in the Ukraine.

The existing members of the GOP leadership, whether visiting Romney's weekend retreat or a Sunday show set on their way to re-intervention, might well wonder where that reliably woozy patriotism has gone. Certainly, Republicans haven't developed a tolerance. They sniff the air and howl: "This is another 9/11 in the making," Lindsey Graham said Sunday on CNN, three days after saying "we've got another Benghazi in the making here". House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon blustered: "The White House has a history of 'considering all options' while choosing none."

Would that Bush have been so indecisive.

The mistake by Republicans – and it is one they make in all sorts of situations – is that they confuse a desire for small government and more individual freedom with a government that acts like an individual. They project onto government the desires and fears that animate a person; in the imagination of Republicans "the government" wants all kinds of things: your guns, for instance. And when Republicans have one of their own in the White House, it pleases them to think that he doesn't just represent the country but is the country.

Perhaps it is a function of having a president who is so radically (including, yes, racially) different from all the ones who came before that Americans seem comfortable with – or at least have accepted the fact of – some distance between who they are, who the president is, and that for which the country stands. It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama's foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert ... just like us.