The mistake Mr. Trump is making is to think ahistorically, that is, to think as though societies do not change dramatically over time. The Neoconservatives thought they could install a king over Iraq in 2003.  But Iraqi society had overthrown the kings in 1958, and there is no going back. History may not be dialectical in exactly the Hegelian sense, but any historical situation does produce other, different situations over time. Moreover, societies can change dramatically.  History is not static.  It is not like a slab of marble.  Historical developments produce new and different historical situations over time, and new generations react to the previous ones by striking out in different direction, even at great risk.

How anyone in his right mind could think that Bashar al-Assad (r. 2000- present) brought stability to Syria just baffles me.  He provoked the 2011 uprisings and he caused the civil war by deploying his military against the peaceful demonstrators.  That's stability?  It is mostly his fault that over 200,000 Syrians are dead and 11 million out of 22 million are homeless.  If you are president and your country is in this condition, you don't get to say you brought stability.  Nor is the problem outsiders.  In 2011 there was almost no outside interference in Syria.  Bashar drove the opposition to pick up arms.  The largely rural and illiterate Syria of 1970 when Bashar's father came to power is long gone.  You can't keep them on the farm once they have seen gay Paree.

Iraq was anything but stable under Saddam Hussein (r. 1979-2003).  The country invaded two neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, in wars that killed perhaps a million Iraqis out of then 16 million!  Thousands were bulldozed into mass graves for belonging to opposition parties.  Does this sound stable to you?  That the regime would have survived in the long term is highly unlikely.  I did and do think the US invasion of Iraq a huge mistake (in early 2003 I compared the idea to that scene in Star Wars where they are in the trash compactor and it starts to move, and Harrison Ford says "I have a bad feeling about this.")  But that is because the war violated international law and brought absolute chaos to Iraq, not because the existing government was "stable" or good for the locals.

Gaddafi's police state was unstable all along, but survived because of repression.  By 2011 it was no longer surviving, because society had changed.  In 1969 Libya was largely rural and illiterate.  In 2011 it was largely urban and literate.  In 1969 most people did not have telephones.  In 2011 most people had cell phones.  When Gaddafi cut off the internet, people just sent videos and messages by SMS on their phones.  People were what Karl Deutsch called "socially mobilized" (urban, literate, connected by communications networks, etc.).  Being socially mobilized is no guarantee of being politically mobilized.  Lots of socially mobilized societies are politically quiescent.  But in 2011 people in Libya became politically mobilized, and their high degree of social mobilization was a real asset in making the revolution.  The UNO/ NATO intervention mainly leveled the playing field for the rebels by destroying regime arms depots out in the desert or targeting SCUD and tank convoys.

Libya under Gaddafi was not stable by 2011, and it was not the United Nations no-fly zone that made it unstable.  It was unstable because Gaddafi's secret police state had lost its authority for a majority of the population, which rose up against it.  That is clear instability, and it was provoked by Gaddafi's erratic and sclerotic dictatorship and by massive repression.  I wandered the halls of the courthouse in Benghazi in May of 2011 and the walls were full of pitiful old black and white pictures of young men, including soldiers, whom Gaddafi had made to disappear, asking plaintively if anyone knew their fate (we know their fate).