Looking at the challenges America faces today in Iraq it is hard to imagine how Iraq can survive as a single state at peace, let alone become a stable democracy. There is a violent insurgency divided three ways ethnically and religiously, fuelled by foreign fighters and regional powers supporting their clients, a terrorised civilian population and an international community deeply divided about what to do.

But we have faced similar problems before. Ten years ago today, after 21 days of negotiations on an air force base outside Dayton, Ohio, the US brought peace to Bosnia. By ending Europe’s worst conflict since the second world war, the Dayton Accords were a complicated solution to an equally complex problem. Bosnia was deeply divided with a bitter legacy of bloodshed, in which outside powers (Serbia and Croatia) had intervened to tear the country apart. Stopping the war was President Bill Clinton’s first big foreign policy success. It reversed three years of frustration and failed policies toward a conflict that cost nearly 300,000 lives and almost broke up the Atlantic Alliance.