“1. What Iraq taught Americans — what Vietnam taught before that — is that Washington foreign-policy planners cannot accurately say beforehand just how long a war will last, how much it will cost, or how many Americans it might ultimately kill, even though many of them earnestly believe that their prognostication is accurate. They’re asking us to believe their assurances about how limited the conflict will be, even though many of them got Iraq wrong on that same metric. They talk about intervention in Syria as if they know just what will happen. That’s part of why they can’t be trusted: their delusions of control.”
