I've learned a lot of painful lessons since Sept. 11, 2001. The only consolation is, everybody else has, too -- at least, everybody who is being honest about it. I was "a 55-45er" on the Iraq war: for it, by a hair. I wrote a book about democracy promotion that sharply criticized President George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda, but was still, in retrospect, too optimistic. I thought the counterinsurgency strategy was the right call for Afghanistan. The world is more recalcitrant -- more tragic -- than I was prepared to accept, or than Bush was prepared to hear. This is, of course, the great lesson of realists like Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan; but it would be a terrible irony if the lasting impact of 9/11 on foreign policy was an acceptance of America's helplessness to shape a better world.

One thing we have learned is that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Those of us who supported the war in Iraq at least in part for humanitarian reasons scarcely imagined that life could get worse for Iraqis than it was under Saddam Hussein. But the Iraqi civilian deaths from the war -- now totaling over 100,000, according to figures compiled by Iraq Body Count -- bleakly demonstrate the limits of our imagination. And yes, of course, the Bush administration was criminally negligent in its management of postwar Iraq; but Saddam's brutality had so deeply damaged Iraq that sectarian warfare might have broken out no matter what the United States did.

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Another lesson we have learned is: Just because we must do something doesn't mean that we can do it. The 9/11 attacks persuaded Bush and his top aides that the United States could no longer afford to ignore failed or autocratic states that germinated terrorism -- thus the Freedom Agenda. As Bush majestically phrased it in his second inaugural address, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Policymakers thus needed to find instruments -- including but scarcely limited to regime change -- to reach inside states. The insight was correct, but Bush quickly discovered the limits of the American capacity to shape countries for the better. In 2005, he tried to push Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to hold free and fair elections. But when Mubarak realized that such elections would bring the opposition to power, he cracked down hard. Again, you can blame the Bush administration -- and I did -- for abandoning the Freedom Agenda out of fear that it might bring Islamists to power and for undermining its rhetoric with the abusive treatment of detainees in the war on terror. But the truth is that the United States lacked the instruments to produce the change it sought.

President Barack Obama, convinced that Bush had effectively poisoned the idea of democracy promotion, put a stop both to the grandiose language and to the impossible expectations it aroused. In the summer of 2009 he was criticized for holding his tongue when the Iranian regime rigged an election to block reformers from wining seats. But Obama understood that U.S. interference might do more harm than good; he was well schooled in the limits of the possible. During that same period, however, Obama was being driven to the conclusion -- very reluctantly, by most accounts -- that the only way the United States could win the war in Afghanistan was by helping the Afghans create a legitimate government. And so he accepted the logic of the counterinsurgency war that Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal proposed to fight there.

At the time, in the early fall of 2009, I was writing an article about Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden kept telling me -- and of course Obama and anyone else who would listen -- that the policy wouldn't work and wasn't necessary. But Obama concluded that it was necessary, and therefore had to work -- at least well enough to allow the United States to leave behind a functioning Afghan government.

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