History doesn’t repeat itself, but it can rhyme. There are many obvious reasons why 2025 is not 2003, but the specter of the invasion of Iraq still hangs over President Donald Trump’s decision to launch targeted strikes on Iran this weekend. Then, as now, the intelligence assessments underlying U.S. strikes didn’t quite match the claims of U.S. politicians. Then, as now, European governments called for restraint, though Britain seemed more supportive of aggressive action. Then, as now, many Western pundits (and the Israeli prime minister) exulted at the prospect of successful regime change in the Middle East. In Trump’s words, he was bombing for peace. U.S. warplanes targeted three key Iranian nuclear facilities Saturday night, and according to Trump, they were “totally obliterated.” The move appeared coordinated with an extended Israeli campaign against the Islamic republic that has dragged on for 10 days and seen the two regional powers trade waves of airstrikes and missile barrages, killing civilians on both sides. In the aftermath of the U.S. intervention, Trump warned Iran’s theocratic regime against further retaliation. “There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” Trump said, reiterating that there were many more targets within the country of more than 90 million people that the United States could hit. Last week, he had suggested that U.S. forces even had Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in their crosshairs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cheered on the U.S. entry into the war his government triggered earlier this month when it bombed key Iranian installations and assassinated top military leaders and Iranian nuclear scientists. “History will record that President Trump acted to deny the world’s most dangerous regime the world’s most dangerous weapons,” he said Sunday. “His leadership today has created a pivot of history that can help lead the Middle East and beyond to a future of prosperity and peace.” Iran’s wounded regime described Trump’s decision as treachery, given ongoing back-channel diplomacy and the White House’s announcement Thursday that Trump would wait up to two weeks to give negotiations a chance before it would take action. “The door for diplomacy should be always kept open, but this is not the case right now,” Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said at a Sunday briefing while in Istanbul. “It was not Iran, but the U.S. who betrayed diplomacy. I think they have proved that they are not men of diplomacy and they only understand the language of threat and force.”  | | |
Trump has long cast himself as a peacemaker, righting the wrongs of an earlier era of U.S. overreach. In various election cycles, he denounced Washington’s political establishment for its regime-changing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had a steep cost in U.S. blood and treasure, yet achieved, at best, dubious strategic results. In his January inaugural address, Trump said the U.S. “will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted Sunday morning that the U.S. was not pursuing “regime change” in Iran, while Vice President JD Vance strained credulity when he said the U.S. was not at war with Iran, but with Iran’s nuclear program. It’s not clear whether the Iranian regime appreciates the distinction. A vast uncertainty looms over the region. We’re still gauging how much damage the U.S. actually inflicted on these key enrichment sites and how Iran’s battered regime will choose to respond. Iranian lawmakers on Sunday openly discussed shutting down the Strait of Hormuz — a critical passage for global oil shipping — though such a blockade would more immediately harm Iran’s neighbors and allies, like China, than the U.S. Trump may be counting on Tehran to recognize its current weakness. “Many of Iran’s retaliatory options are the strategic equivalent of a suicide bombing,” noted Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They can strike U.S. embassies and bases, attack oil facilities in the Persian Gulf, mine the Strait of Hormuz, or rain missiles on Israel — but the regime may not survive the blowback.” Still, the risk of a spiraling conflagration pulling the U.S. deeper into the conflict is real and flies in the face of Trump’s own rhetoric and the desires of much of the Republican base. “By doing this, Trump threatens to short-circuit his own diplomatic negotiations that were proving fruitful and risks plunging the nation into yet another quagmire,” Matthew Duss, a former progressive congressional foreign policy staffer, and Sohrab Ahmari, a right-wing commentator, wrote jointly in The Washington Post. “A new war would be a grave betrayal of the millions of working-class Americans who pulled for him last year seeking domestic revival, not foreign adventurism.”  | | |
Iran’s regime does not appear on the verge of buckling. Israel’s attacks had stoked nationalism among an Iranian public that has, at best, mixed feelings about the theocratic regime that has held sway for half a century. “There are currently no indications that the central government in Tehran is losing control — quite the opposite,” three Israeli officials said in briefing the Jerusalem Post. “The Iranian regime appears to be tightening its grip.” A host of ordinary Iranians have been speaking to my colleagues, on the condition of anonymity, about their fears over the escalating situation. “If, in the first days of the war, people thought that there would be some limits, that they’ll return again to negotiations, right now, the main dread is that this war will stretch on,” said a woman who had fled her home in Tehran. “Imagine this — we have a misogynist theocracy in Iran with Supreme Leader Khamenei at the top, who took us to hell while promising us heaven, and at the same time Netanyahu, who is taking us to hell while promising freedom and democracy,” Narges Mohammadi, a prominent Iranian human rights activist, told the BBC last week. Numerous Iranian critics of the regime are worried that the war may set back their own quest for democracy and greater freedoms. Some analysts in Washington recognize Iran’s weak hand but also see the ghosts of the past. “These strikes may work out. In the coming days or weeks, Iran may be forced to accept terms favorable to Israel and the United States and the war may quickly end,” wrote Ilan Goldenberg in Foreign Affairs. “But the track record of American military interventions in the Middle East and the nature of war over human history shows that American involvement comes with tremendous risk.” |
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