Ten years ago this week, the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq, ostensibly in search of "weapons of mass destruction." Today, the American war in Iraq is over, but the argument about it still hovers over our foreign policy. We asked eight writers—some of whom supported the war, others who opposed it—to reflect on what the past decade has meant.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: "For all the talk about futility and perversity in interventions, it is well to remember that not all of them have failed."

Even those who initially supported the war now reluctantly accept that the consequences of invading Iraq were perverse and that attempts to replace tyranny with political order there have been futile. President Obama has taken the lessons of futility and perversity to heart and they may be shaping his overriding policy ambition—to end his second term with no American combat troops in harm's way anywhere in the world. This would certainly be a popular presidential legacy in a country that feels the fiscal reality of imperial overstretch more deeply than at any time in its recent history.

The problem with the lessons of the past is that they can be true and still not offer a reliable guide to the future. The question that hovers over the tenth anniversary of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq is whether the lessons of perversity and futility learned there are the right guides for U.S. policy next door. Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence. Now, 80 years later, both of them are coming apart, Syria in a bloody uprising against the last remaining Baathist tyrant, Iraq in a slow motion civil war among Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis. No one can predict whether either state will survive as a state or fragment into ethnic enclaves, but if they do fragment, the Middle East as a whole is bound to be a different—and less stable—neighborhood. The U.S. has an interest in stability, but the failures in Iraq seem to counsel against trying to create order in Syria. Certainly, if a ground invasion and combat troops failed in Iraq, they will fail in Syria. Departing Defense Secretary Gates was surely right that no president in his right mind will ever want to commit ground troops to the Middle East again.

But does this exhaust the lessons that Iraq holds for Syria? Has American policy become so risk averse that no action in Syria is possible? It is one thing to take futility and perversity to heart, another to conclude that doing the least you can is the only safe option. And there are robust things that can be done, even when we acknowledge the weaknesses of the Syrian opposition, the risk of inadvertently aiding Islamist combat units, and the likelihood that anything America does now is unlikely to give it much influence over the Syria that emerges after Assad’s last stand. Actively helping the exhausted municipal councils in the free zones of Syria to keep the lights on, feed their people, repair infrastructure and get economic activity moving again are all actions that would speed the desired end. Since there is a NATO ally on Syria’s border, delivering aid to the insurgents’ hinterland is feasible. Telling Assad that if he uses Scuds, helicopter gunships, and jets to bomb his own people, they will be shot down by the Patriot batteries is a risk-filled step and will be opposed by the Russians, but are no risks ever to be taken? Should the U.S. stand by until the regime and the opposition are fighting it out house-to-house in Damascus? What exactly does the U.S. gain by standing by as the Syrian people are pulverized from the air? For all the talk about futility and perversity in interventions, it is well to remember that not all of them have failed. No one is dying in Bosnia.