Eli Lake, Columnist

America Learned Wrong Lessons From Iraq, and Syria Suffers

Foreign policy has become inordinately timid because any muscular proposal is instantly derided as Iraq redux.

April 11, 2018 at 4:49 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

So the U.S. was wrong about Saddam Hussein's weapons. That doesn't mean it's wrong about Bashar al-Assad's.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

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For more than a decade the easiest way to win a foreign policy debate in Washington was to bring up the Iraq War. It's what Barack Obama did to sell his Iran deal in 2015. Senator Rand Paul played the Iraq War card last year to press the case for staying out of Syria. Lawmakers and pundits have offered ritual apologies for going along with the calls to oust Iraq's dictator in 2003.

Any muscular foreign policy -- from political support for a country's internal opposition to calling for a no-fly zone -- is derided as Iraq redux. It's a historical lens that distorts how people see current events. Are we really sure the Assad regime ordered this chemical weapons attack? Remember how wrong we were about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.