Foreign Policy

Phil Klay | 1.7.2026 4:04 PM

As one government official after another talks about regime change and the removal of an awful dictator in Venezuela, you can forgive Iraq War veterans like me for being nervous.

When I contemplated joining the Marine Corps in 2002, I found a similar "humanitarian" case for war compelling: The Iraqi people were suffering under a brutal dictator, and even in the worst-case scenario, removing him would be a net good. What followed was civil war, mass death, swelling ranks of terror groups, genocide, mass rape, and slavery. 

Seventeen years after I had that calming thought about removing a dictator, I spoke with a woman in northern Iraq who had been enslaved by ISIS. I was on a United Nations trip through northern Iraq. She told a group of foreign policy analysts how ISIS had slaughtered the people of her town and taken the young girls, including her and her 13-year-old sister, into slavery. After the collapse of the terror state, ISIS-affiliated families like the one she'd been sold to were herded into the sprawling al-Hol refugee camp in Syria, trapping victims and slavers together. A Yazidi smuggling operation found her and smuggled her out. But her sister was still there.

Near where the survivors spoke, their children played and sang along to........

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