Twenty-two years after the invasion of Iraq, a new American voice has emerged to concede that the war was not just a political miscalculation, but rather a structural failure that struck at the heart of the Middle East. Tom Barrack’s remarks as the US Presidential Envoy to Syria read like an addendum to a long history of misjudgement — a belated recognition that the United States cannot and never will be able to remake countries in its own image through military force. Nations are not built by tanks, nor do they rise from the rubble of toppled regimes without vision.

Speaking to The National in Abu Dhabi, Barrack abandoned the habitual diplomatic language and spoke with unusual candour. Washington, he said, ‘Balkanised Iraq and Syria,’ and the invasion of Iraq became ‘a great example of what we should never do again.’ He was not attempting to soften the past, but offering a blunt diagnosis: three trillion dollars spent, twenty years of fractured history and hundreds of thousands of lives lost — and, in his own words, ‘we left with nothing’.

While this acknowledgement is not new, it is the most explicit to emerge from within the decision-making circle. It articulates what successive US administrations have tried to avoid admitting: that Washington attempted to impose a federal republic on a deeply divided, sectarian and ethnic landscape. Instead, a fragmented system was created that empowered militias rather than institutions. Barrack was unequivocal: ‘The structure we created allowed the militias to effectively control parliament.........

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