MOSCOW, June 21. /TASS/. Senior Russian senator Frantz Klintsevich said on Tuesday if the United States indeed had learned a lesson from the 2003 invasion of Iraq then Washington would have given up its attempts to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad.

"I’m not sure that the US indeed learned all lessons from the intervention in Iraq. In this case, they should have abandoned any attempts to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad and allowed people to choose the fate of the current authorities themselves," Klintsevich, first deputy chairman of the Committee for Defense and Security at the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, told TASS.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday a basic lesson that Washington learned after the 2003 invasion of Iraq is that the US will not be successful and nor will anyone else "in imposing a military solution on the problems inside of Syria."