Two decades later, it feels as if the US is trying to forget the Iraq war ever happened | Stephen Wertheim

In framing the Ukraine war as a fight between democracy and autocracy, Biden shows that the US hasn't learned from Iraq

Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.

Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine's fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country - since world war II, nothing like that has happened."

Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy