The mistakes the US has made in Afghanistan and Iraq are neither original nor unusual. They characterize three generations of Middle East policy under more than a dozen Washington administrations. Only a few US leaders have maximized its potential to influence. Its enemies learned how to exploit these problems. Its friends only occasionally managed to help it shake off its expectations. Israel is especially frustrated by the US tendency to err in its understanding of the region and manage it according to a policy that goes against regional and global needs.
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For the most part, people in Washington still haven't learned to draw conclusions from the successes of wise American policy (mostly in the glory days of Nixon and Kissinger) and from its more damaging failures (mostly under Eisenhower, Carter, Bush Jr., and Obama). The source of most of these failures lies in the ongoing, determined denial of the deep-seated gap between the different motivations and priorities that repeatedly dictate the political behavior of people in the region and the ridiculous American expectations. Especially serious is the American difficulty in understanding the phenomenon of radicalism in generation and its Arab and Islamist forms in particular.
There is a common, deeply-held belief in the US that humans, for the most part, aside from cultural differences, aspire to "the good life" and interpret this concept in the western sense: well-being, political freedom, and personal safety that give the individual an opportunity to improve his standing and achievements. They apply this modern and pluralistic outlook to tribal, violent societies, as well, and assume – explicitly or implicitly – that they perpetuate their patriarchal, authoritarian, and belligerent structures simply because they have not been given a fair chance for "the good life" because of foreign occupiers or corrupts rulers.
From here, it's a short leap to assuming that American involvement in democratizing regimes, lifting foreign rules, market economies, and individual initiative will allow third-world societies to throw off external obstacles that are preventing them from living the good life and make them allies that espouse western democratic values. The observation that the centrist stream in most of these societies clings to a culture that holds it back and causes it poverty and suffering is denigrated as racist. The public's fervent support for radical leaders operating without this cultural framework is presented as "irrational" and something that can be changed.
This American worldview is dissonant with reality. It sees as "impossible" that Iraqi society would reject democracy, that the Palestinians would reject a historic compromise, that Muslim women would support a way of life that oppresses them, that countries rich in natural resources suffer from hunger. "It cannot be" that Arab immigrants bring their failing culture that wrecked their lives in the first place with them to Europe. It's "irrational" that the recent generations of people born in the region support en mass destructive, oppressive, and often corrupt types like Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Arafat, Gaddafi, Erdogan, and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are consistently responsible for their failures and distress. It's "unreasonable" that the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring that successfully ousted oppressive and violent rulers ended in civil wars, destruction, and more extensive suffering and destruction than what they sought to prevent.
From the "progressives" to the neo-conservatives, the Americans err in deluding themselves. From Eisenhower, who allowed Nasser's missionary leadership in 1956 and Kennedy who tried to placate him; to Carter who tried to placate Assad and Arafat and was stopped by Sadat; and Bush Jr., who tried to bring democracy to Iraq; and Obama, who strengthened Iranian radicalism and the Palestinian lawlessness. They all denied the fact that the region's tribal, pre-modern society does not see the "good life" as democracy, compromise, peace, pluralism, equal rights for women, and individual welfare and liberty, but as a massive step back to the past and compensation for the hurt feelings that developed during the failed attempts to confront the modern world.
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