Twitter, or X, did not exist when the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. But a quick perusal of the popular social media website in the 48 hours following the latest U.S. bombing campaign in Iran was like opening a time capsule from 23 years ago and watching all the hawkish talking points spill out.
Not long ago, it seemed as if the failure of the Iraq War had become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in our age of deeply polarized politics. The improbable leader who helped forge that consensus—or, perhaps more accurately, encouraged Republicans finally to join it—was Donald Trump.
As late as the 2016 primaries, Republican presidential candidates had difficulty answering the question of whether they would have invaded Iraq knowing what they knew by that point in time. What Donald Rumsfeld might have called known knowns more than a decade after that ill-fated invasion included the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the costly occupation and insurgency, the humanitarian crisis among Iraqi Christians, the lack of evidence for the more dire pre-invasion predictions (no smoking guns turning into mushroom clouds, no elaborate conspiracy between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attackers), the full price tag of the American blood and treasure spent on a lengthy war.
Not Trump. He called the Iraq War a “big, fat mistake.” He suggested the war’s boosters probably knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. He said things on the debate stage in South Carolina that nearly got Ron Paul booed out of the convention hall—and then he went on to win the South Carolina primary and the nomination. Trump was the Republican presidential nominee in three consecutive elections, winning two of them. And in his most recent victory, Trump especially leaned into a more or less antiwar message.
That all seems ironic now, and not in the Alanis Morissette sense of the word.
Perhaps the current conflict with Iran won’t turn into anything like the Iraq War. But we’re already hearing the same premature triumphalism, as if Iraq did not seem like a smashing success itself in the first few days of the war. We are seeing a lot of commentary, including by people who should know better, that the beginning of all wisdom on foreign policy is figuring out whether the regime in question is bad—analysis that is more appropriate for rooting for the American teams in the Olympics than matters of war and peace.
Iran is more of a bad actor outside its own territory than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was by 2003. There are also more educated, comparatively liberal Iranians who might conceivably take over the country, though there are no guarantees. But the current war also has a much shoddier congressional authorization than did Iraq and is not coming on the heels of anything like the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Iraq was targeted because its government was militarily weak enough to allow for an easy victory, sending a signal to other governments in the region while at the same time avoiding any future risks posed by Saddam Hussein at a time when many policymakers feared 9/11 proved deterrence too risky.
The present campaign in Iran is similarly motivated: Tehran is seen as weak, not strong, though it may not always be so. So the time has come to act now.
It took decades of smaller, targeted military actions after the folly of Vietnam and the biggest terrorist attack ever on American soil to make Iraq politically possible. It took only a handful of such military actions, mainly in Trump’s second term, to make Iran thinkable while the generation of leaders responsible for Iraq hasn’t completely passed from power.
The best reason at the moment to hope that Iran will turn out differently from Iraq is Trump’s documented willingness to quit while he is ahead. Trump may retain just enough of the lessons of Iraq he otherwise appears to be rapidly forgetting, and certainly has advisers who mean what they say about forever wars, even if they seem to be overruled with some frequency.
It is also clear that Democrats are generally less fearful of opposing wars now than they were 20-plus years ago, though that has more to do with partisanship than principles or prudence.
Still, a depressing amount of the debate over Iran is taking place as if Iraq never happened, and it is annoying to have to remind anyone that it did.
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