As we mark the twentieth anniversary of one of the most disastrous wars in U.S. history, America’s foreign policy elite have learned surprisingly few worthwhile lessons. What lessons they have learned seem to be the smaller and less important ones. In that sense, the aftermath of the Iraq War has replicated the Vietnam War’s unfortunately limited and temporary beneficial impact on America’s foreign policy perspective.
One frustrated colleague observed to me as he witnessed the onset of Washington’s regime-change wars and its nation-building ventures in the 1990s and early 2000s that the lesson most Americans seemed to have taken away from the Vietnam debacle was, “Don’t fight a war in a country called Vietnam.” 
Much is the case again as most of the bigger, more fundamental lessons from Washington’s failed crusade on the Euphrates have g …