Regarding your points:
1) The U.S., like every major western power in the last couple of hundred years, uses war to achieve political objectives. In the case of the Iraq war, it was to turn a regime that was slipping out from under America's thumb and replace it with one that was friendlier to the U.S. That happened. Regardless of whether you think the war was ultimately in the U.S.'s interests, it's hard to call something that so much of the population supported so long truly outrageous. "Outrageous" must be more than mere political disagreement.
2) There is nothing outrageous about the U.S. educational system. Adjusted for our socio-economic demographics, the U.S. performs about the same on international educational tests as western european countries: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin.... In the U.S., the educational system has become the whipping boy for deep-rooted sociological problems. In a nutshell, whites enslaved black people for hundreds of years, systematically denied them the opportunity to advance, and when the Supreme Court forced integration just 60 years ago, whites responded by fleeing the cities to homogenous suburbs, leaving urban cores full of poor blacks and none of the infrastructure of functioning middle class society. On the other front, we let in huge numbers of low-income Hispanic immigrants, far more than we can effectively integrate into the larger society. In the face of all this, we have the gall to blame it all on the educational system.
When Chicago's public school system drag's down the average of the whole of Illinois, everyone blames the schools. They blame No Child Left Behind, they blame teachers, they blame the Department of Education. But it's not the schools' fault that so many of those kids have no fathers, that the neighborhoods are dominated by gangs, that the kids come from generations of families without any education. There is no educational fix to these sociological problems. The solution isn't within the government's power, and certainly not within that of the schools. The solution is all the middle class people from the Detroit suburbs moving back into the city, stabilizing the social structure of the city, sending their kids to Detroit public schools so as to dilute the influence of social phenomena like gangs that thrive in low-income ghettos, and to build functioning integrated communities with broad parental involvement. Butt hat will happen when hell freezes over, and until then people will complain ceaselessly about the government's failure with regard to education.
3) Massive youth unemployment relative to who else? U.S. youth unemployment rate (15-24) is right around the OECD average, below all of the big western European countries except Germany: http://www.economist.com/node/21528614.