If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.

For the U.S., as the largest player in the global environment, unintended consequences are magnified.

I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

Oh, the unintended consequences of perfidy!

The question shouldn't be what we ought to do, but what we can do.