I made the mistake of not finishing my sentence; next time I will finish it. I was about to say that my examples included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, I would suggest, Syria. In Iraq, there can be no doubt that we went to war on a false premise: there were no WMD. We were all deceived; the job of Chilcot is to determine whether No. 10 intentionally deceived us.
On Afghanistan, I supported the initial deployment in 2001 to rid the country of al-Qaeda, and there is strong evidence to suggest that we succeeded in that objective in the very early years. Where it went disastrously wrong—this takes us back to the fact that we did not fully understand events on the ground—was when we allowed the mission to morph into nation-building. We went into Helmand without fully realising what it involved, and we certainly under-resourced our operations, which was a bad mistake.
In Libya, we knocked down the door—that was the relatively easy bit—but the country has turned out to be a complete and utter shambles, in part because we failed to understand that the opposition to Gaddafi would splinter into 100-plus groups with different objectives. Law and order has been non-existent in Libya ever since, which has led to more bloodshed and a vicious civil war.