Was the Iraq war worth it or not?
There are still many who claim that it was, and not just full-on neo-cons, but also those of the Chris Hitchens persuasion, who consider themselves some sort of leftist. Perhaps in the US it was entirely a conservative project, but here many Blair-supporters still try and defend it as a good thing that just had some flaws in its execution (anything that went wrong was the fault of people other than themselves, of course). Many of these are former-leftists and centrists, still on their slow-motion journey to the right.
I disagree with them, but I do think it's a really hard question, because it depends on so many counterfactuals. Such as, how would the Saddam regime have ended, and what would have replaced it, if left to it's own devices or pressured in more subtle and less violent ways? And it also depends on where Iraq ends up, in this timeline, because the consequences of that intervention are clearly far from over. And then there's the moral philosophy question of how far one has the right to offset deaths of people who aren't you, against some alleged improvement in the world? Even if Iraq is better-off now than it would have been under Saddam, how do you tell that to the tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands who died to get us here?
The same people who attempt to defend the Iraq war as a good idea, executed imperfectly, are the same who now agitate for stronger military intervention in Syria. And I find some of what they say about Syria to be unsettling - certainly there are some on the left who go beyond just being cautious about war, to being sympathetic to Assad. You find all sorts of unpleasant chains-of-association between people. And exclusively opposing Western intervention is a bit weird when the Russians are intervening big-time.
But I still end up thinking 'the West' is just not suited to 'bring democracy' to anyone else, because our own system is so flawed, it will inevitably go horribly wrong, as it invariably has on every past occasion that wasn't about doing it to Germany or Japan.