A little more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a President stood on the precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished”.
By the time the US withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.
The spectre of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump, who campaigned against America’s “forever wars”, is pondering a swift deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some 200,000 American troops massed in West Asia, or antiwar demonstrations around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the same.
“So much of this is the same story told again”, said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”
There are many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that US troops would be greeted as liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq.
And America held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final decision.
Today Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform West Asia.
There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon.
Some of the same neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq are now pushing for war with Iran. “You’ve got to go to war with the President you have”, said William Kristol, a Never Trumper and editor at large of The Bulwark who was a prominent advocate of war with Iraq. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.”