Rationale:

It's useful to say just what iter_swap does. There may be some iterators for which we want to specialize iter_swap, but the fully general version should have a general specification.

Note that in the specific case of list<T>::iterator, iter_swap should not be specialized as suggested above. That would do much more than exchanging the two iterators' values: it would change predecessor/successor relationships, possibly moving the iterator from one list to another. That would surely be inappropriate.