The U.S. Failure to Learn from Iraq Intervention

The Obama administration repeated some of its predecessor's foreign policy mistakes, albeit on a lesser scale and in different circumstances, by intervening in Libya and Syria. The administration lost sight of the core lesson exposed by U.S. failures in Iraq: all political ruptures are fraught with danger, in these two cases even when created by heroic popular mobilisation. The temptation to believe that regime change can offer a ready-made way out of the intolerable present, a shortcut through history, is at some level understandable, but it misses some key points.