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I'm no neocon, but successful interventions are easily forgotten, botched ones never area. How many lives did intervention save in Sierra Leone? In Kosovo? Operation Barkhane (until Mali kicked them out)? How many might have been saved if the West have been more active in Rwanda or Bosnia?
Foreign policy decisions seem to often suffer from the lessons of over-learning from the past. True, this does indeed mean that not every dictator is a Hitler. But equally not every plausible intervention is another Iraq.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are the four major interventions prior to Ukraine. All four were complete disasters, and the two we committed hardest to did meaningful long-term damage to America in the form of trillions in additional debt and eroded social cohesion.
These were pretty marginal 'interventions'. In the case of Libya it was a no-fly zone and some sporadic airstrikes, and for all Hillary bloviated I doubt that the outcome of the Libyan Civil War would have been any less disastrous if the West did nothing except maybe Gaddafi kills a few more rebels on his way out. Post-Gaddafi the West has done almost nothing. While there has been slightly more involvement in Syria, this has been mostly fighting ISIS and didn't really start until the civil war was well underway - again, it's hardly as if absent US action Assad would have regained control over Syria. Occasionally airstriking an airfield hardly changed the course of the war. Objectively, in terms of actual action taken by the West, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were far more 'major' interventions and were successes.
Iraq was obviously a total disaster, but it was preceded by totally disastrous non-interventions and some successful interventions - this is precisely the point I'm making about over-learning lessons - not every intervention is another Iraq.
After all, Ukraine or most other contemporary foreign policy problems are not analogous in any meaningful way to Iraq or Afghanistan. The west should take some lessons from those two disasters, but the ghosts of the past can't dictate foreign policy forever.
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