Dangers of not learning the lessons from Iraq

It is well worth reading Simon Jenkin's piece in this morning's Guardian in which he claims that "The errors of Iraq are being repeated - and magnified."

Jenkins argues that

Britain and now the US are both led by men whose heart was never in this war, and want only to get out with some dignity intact. The much oversold "surge" has offered such a screen. War fever has given way to war weariness. Nobody has a clue what will happen next in Iraq, and ever fewer care

and reminds us that

After five years of occupation and £7bn of public money, London's finest minds joined with those of Washington to reduce what should be one of the world's richest countries to shambles. Iraq is still an economic and social basket case compared with its neighbours, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Jordan.

So what will the next 2 years bring? Well if nothing else

It should teach a lesson that foreign expeditions undertaken in a spirit of jingoist revenge, with a crazed optimism and no strategic plan, are usually a bad idea.

And the danger for Jenkins is that Afghanistan will slip into the same routine but

The awful prospect is that Obama and Brown may feel too weak to learn from Iraq and pull back. They will blunder on, not to a clean defeat but to something far worse, a war of attrition whose poison will spread across a subcontinent