The neocon ideology that paved the bloody road to this war is actually now the established, largely uncontested foreign policy doctrine in most NATO member states, the “once in a century level of political juice” was used to make it not only a bipartisan stance in the US and the UK, but to completely silence all public opposition to it. And the only reason i’m aware of that is that i actually posess some degree of object permanence and am also old enough to remember how this total discursive domination happened a few years later in my country, which wasn’t on board with the Iraq war and has been a prime CIA psyop target ever since.

The main learning from the catastrophic outcome in Iraq seems to be that it’s more viable to do this shit in the form of proxy wars than to engage directly. But i’m honestly unsure if increasing instability in the Greater Middle East and killing a careful estimate of 3-4 million people during the Wars on Terror is even viewed as a catastrophic outcome in the US or if the regime in D.C. just goes “eh, not as we originally hoped for, but total chaos in that region is acceptable, too”.