I have to say this constant refrain of comparing the current Syria mess to Bush and Iraq is absurd and is getting quite annoying. There is no comparison. Period. I'm not gonna pretend Bush didn't make serious mistakes viz Iraq and that looked at from a viewpoint of Iranian regional influence the invasion can be with some legitimacy viewed as completely moronic - but let's look at the facts. You had 9/11 which was only 50% successful and was still pretty bad - had it been 100% successful you would have had a ruined Pentagon, with Rumsfeld possibly dead, and either a destroyed White House or a destroyed Congress with possibly dozens of lawmakers dead - not good. That's what Bush was dealing with - and the thought that if these people got hold of chemical, biological or radiological weapons the threat to America could be existential. Okay? That's quite a remove from Syria, ain't it?
So we invade Afghanistan and that goes incredibly well - we basically take over a country with a handful of special forces guys - and then you start doing the math. We've wanted to get rid of Saddam, an invidious troublemaker, for a long time, and that included Clinton who I believe hatched two plans to that end - we have a 'new' way of war which we think can get it done expeditiously - we believe and everybody else believes he has WMDs - plus it's logical to conclude, looking at radical Islam, that the problem here is a lack of secular democracy in these bloody countries - and so the thoughts coalesce - let's get rid of Saddam, get rid of his WMDs, set up some democracy, and send a message to all the evil fuckers out there that if they're looking to screw with Uncle Sam, watch the fuck out. Easy now in hindsight to criticise it - but at the time?
Now you can with complete legitimacy fault Bush for totally botching the post hostilities dynamic - but there's no way in hell you can compare Syria to Iraq. Seen from a certain angle and understanding the context of the immediate post 9/11 times, Iraq made sense - at the time I said if you were entirely for or against the war you weren't paying attention - it was a 60/40 toss up either way - and the fact that the post hostilities environment was totally mismanaged means we can never know if the people who supported the invasion were maybe more right than wrong.
To me Iraq made one central thing clear - we in the West didn't clearly understand how significant, destabilizing and incendiary the Sunni/Shia divide was - if you could go back and do Iraq again with a complete understanding of how explosive this sectarian divide is, who knows what happens. One thing for sure, you sure as hell don't disband the largely Sunni military, probably the key mistake made in post war Iraq - that, and the rush to democracy - democracy should have been eased in and should have been explicitly secular. [although, admittedly, the last ten years have clearly demonstrated the impediments in Muslim culture regarding adoption of democracy are extremely difficult to overcome and so even a well managed and thoughtful post war plan may have failed too].
The point being that in the immediate post 9/11 world Iraq legitimately represented conceptually both a threat and an opportunity for us - Syria is manifestly neither, unless of course we make it so by turning it into the flash point of a regional war. Twenty twenty hindsight can pretend that Iraq was entirely misbegotten - but that is absolutely not true, there were legitimate arguments for and against the invasion and the fact that there was no coherent plan for the post war world has post hoc de facto made the anti-invasion crowd seem right, but that's a less than honest appraisal.
The only way Syria even remotely approaches the argument that was Iraq is if we were planning to invade the bloody place, take it over, force secular democracy on it, and effectively say to Iran and Russia and China go and fuck yourselves - but of course that's not at all what we're talking about - what we're talking about is Obama firing off a few Tomahawks in order to repair his reputation or to prop up the delusional 'responsibility to protect' nonsense which is truly misguided in its pretensions - and that is so far removed from Iraq that attempts to compare the two should be proof of an irremediable idiocy.
In short, Iraq may have been a mistake, but seen in the context of the immediate post 9/11 world, the problem of Saddam which had been dragging on for ten years at that point, and the initial success of Afghanistan which fed illusions regarding how things might play out in Iraq, it was an understandable mistake - whereas involvement in Syria at this late date, with no clear and compelling, never mind achievable objective guiding it and no desire or interest shown at all on the part of Obama [not to mention the Joint Chiefs] for a commitment to a wider, more comprehensive involvement should it become necessary, has mistake written all over it right from the beginning.
