WASHINGTON — It was a memorial event for the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, who was buried in November with a state funeral in the country he helped liberate, but the question that hung over Wednesday night’s gathering here was whether it was really a funeral for the idea of American intervention against brutal dictators.

Certainly that concept is less than popular among the current crop of presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat. A few pages earlier in the same reporter’s notebook I brought to the Chalabi event are my notes from the recent debates. Donald Trump reminds voters he opposed the Iraq War. Senator Ted Cruz mourns the ouster of Mubarak in Egypt and Gaddafi in Libya and warns, “if we topple Assad the result will be ISIS will take over Syria.” Senator Rand Paul pronounces, “If you believe in regime change you are mistaken.” Senator Bernie Sanders says, “Secretary Clinton is a little too much into regime change … I’m not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is.”

Chalabi was mourned and eulogized for what his nephew, Ali Chalabi, described as a “brilliant mind,” his “charm and charisma,” his “intelligence and courage.” But one couldn’t help but wonder whether what followed the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein has sharply reduced the chance that America will try this again somewhere else anytime soon.

More than 4,000 American soldiers were killed; Iraq is afflicted by violent chaos and partly occupied by the Islamic State more than a dozen years after the dictator’s capture; we failed to find an active program of weapons of mass destruction (notwithstanding that the New York Times reported in 2014 that “American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs” in Iraq, and that Moshe Ya’alon, who is now the defense minister of Israel, told me in 2005 that Saddam moved some chemical weapons to Syria before the start of the Iraq war).

Francis Brooke, an American who worked closely with Chalabi and who spoke at and helped organize the memorial, conceded the point to me in a conversation at the reception that followed the gathering. It’s not only President Obama who is reluctant to become involved overseas after the Iraq experience, Mr. Brooke said, “but the American people also. It doesn’t resonate like it used to.”

Mr. Brooke recalled that when in the 1990s Chalabi and he first started coming around Capitol Hill, attempting to build support for the policy of regime change in Iraq that eventually became American law with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, they ran into skepticism and resistance bordering on outright opposition because of the memory of the Vietnam War. That experience was 20 years old but fresh in the minds of politicians such as Senators Kerry and McCain. Advocates of some future regime change will face similar resistance from those with Iraq in mind.

Yet those future advocates, too, may eventually succeed in overcoming that resistance, as Chalabi and his band of allies, many in attendance Wednesday night, managed to do. In his remarks at the memorial ceremony, Mr. Brooke spoke of Chalabi’s solid faith in the ideas of America’s Declaration of Independence — that all people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and that the only legitimate governments are those based on the consent of the governed. If America is true to those ideals, it will help out in other places.

This is a long-running argument in American politics. I couldn’t help thinking of a letter Samuel Adams wrote to his cousin John Adams on October 4, 1790. Both men had signed the Declaration of Independence. Samuel, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, wrote to John, then the vice president of the United States, that “even savages might, by means of education, be instructed to frame the best civil and political institutions with as much skill and ingenuity, as they now shape their arrows.”

Chalabi, whose optimism was frequently remarked on at the memorial event, would doubtless have agreed, while also probably bristling at any broad-brush depiction of Middle Easterners as savages.

If his contributions are complex as viewed through the prism of this moment in contemporary American presidential politics, from an Iraqi perspective the picture is more clear. The memorial was held at the Consulate of Iraq, an impressive edifice just off Dupont Circle, and the Iraqi ambassador to America, Lukman Faily, hailed Chalabi for his wisdom and energy for “changing the daily lives of Iraqi citizens to the better.”

Said Ambassador Faily, “He is a hero.”

Mr. Stoll, editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com, is the author of “Samuel Adams: A Life.”