( CNN ) -- David Cameron must have whiplash . Practically overnight this week , the British prime minister went from being one of the leading voices demanding that Syria 's President Bashar al-Assad be punished for using chemical weapons , to a humbled , chastened politician with his hands tied . British lawmakers voted Thursday night against even the possibility of using force against Syria , forcing Cameron to concede bluntly , `` We will not be taking part in military action . '' What do Syria 's neighbors think ? The vote was close -- seven MPs out of the 557 who voted could have changed the result -- and the outcome was a shock . Prime ministers are n't supposed to lose votes on the use of military force . British media said it had n't happened in hundreds of years . But although the result was stunning in one sense , in another it was n't surprising . Over more than seven hours of debate on Syria loomed one chilling specter : Iraq . Bergen : Syria is a problem from hell for the U.S. Britain feels badly burned by the way Tony Blair led the country into war there a decade ago , and Cameron was fighting a defensive battle against the memory of Blair from the moment he kicked off debate in the House of Commons : `` I 'm deeply mindful of the lessons of previous conflicts , in particular the deep concerns of the country of what went wrong in Iraq . We 're not invading a country ; we 're not searching for chemical weapons . '' It 's an argument he needed to make . Why Russia , China , and Iran are standing by Syria . Just a few hours earlier , the speaker of Syria 's Parliament raised the memory of the `` dodgy dossier '' which Blair 's critics say falsely helped lead Britain to invade Iraq . And some lawmakers clearly felt burned by the Blair government 's case for war , based on false intelligence . Even a senior member of Cameron 's own Conservative Party warned Thursday : `` We must consider that our intelligence might be wrong because it has been before . `` And we must be very hard on testing it , '' David Davis said . Does the public care about U.N. support ? `` We can not ignore the calamitous lessons of the Iraq war , '' said Angus Robertson of the Scottish National Party , who opposed action in Syria . That 's a very normal human response -- so common that there are cliches about it , like `` once bitten , twice shy , '' and `` fool me once , shame on you ; fool me twice , shame on me . '' It 's also the wrong response . Syria is not Iraq . It 's not Libya or Serbia or Nazi Germany . Syria is Syria . Be careful in trying to follow history . Tempting as it is to base policy decisions on past experience , it 's dangerous . No two situations are the same . And yet politicians and pundits , generals and journalists do it all the time . Traumatized by the image of U.S. troops being dragged dead through the streets of Mogadishu , Somalia , in 1993 , Washington declined to intervene in the mass killings in Rwanda a year later . With those hundreds of thousands of deaths fresh in its memory , the West did intervene in Bosnia when concentration camp-style images suggested that genocide was going on there . Any of those decisions could have been right or wrong on their own merits -- the critical thing is that they must have been made on their own merits . Somalia is not Rwanda . Neither one is Bosnia . Iraq is not Afghanistan . For that matter , David Cameron is not Tony Blair and Barack Obama is not George W. Bush . Difficult as it may be , policymakers must not rely on historical examples because every case is unique . It 's intellectually dishonest to say the West should n't bomb Syria because Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction ; it 's naive to say it should bomb because bombing Libya helped dislodge Muammar Gadhafi . Syrian evidence and policy must be considered solely on their own merits . The story of the boy who cried wolf is a caution not to raise false alarms , but it also contains an admonishment for the villagers who did n't check the facts when it turned out there really was a wolf . As usual , Mark Twain put it best : `` We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there , lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid . She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore . ''
Lessons of Iraq pervade dramatic debate in Britain . The British government has been accused by the opposition Labour Party and some Conservatives of being too slow to grasp the implications of a war that is now entering its seventh year. Be careful of history .