World Politics Review Articles The Differences Between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2025 Matter, Too Daniel W. Drezner Wed, July 2, 2025 at 4:25 PM GMT+3

 World Politics Review Articles

The Differences Between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2025 Matter, Too

Daniel W. Drezner

Wed, July 2, 2025 at 4:25 PM GMT+3

8 min read

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks from the East Room of the White House after the U.S. military struck three Iranian nuclear and military sites, in Washington, Saturday, June 21, 2025 (pool photo by Carlos Barria via AP).

Before and after U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, critics compared his actions to the months preceding and following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Prior to Operation Midnight Hammer, as the airstrikes were called, when it was still uncertain whether Trump would follow through on his threat to bomb the sites, Steve Coll already pointed to both “the political use of intelligence” and the Trump administration’s insistence that the U.S. public simply had to trust it had evidence to justify a “preemptive attack” as similarities to 2003. After the airstrikes, when it looked like the U.S. might be joining Israel in an escalating conflict with Iran, Al Jazeera characterized the language and rhetoric used by world leaders as sounding “all too familiar, drawing eerie comparisons to the lead-up to the Iraq war more than two decades ago.”

For those arguing against bombing Iran’s nuclear program, the Iraq analogy is a powerful one to make. Operation Iraqi Freedom is widely viewed as an expensive U.S. foreign policy blunder that accomplished little more than eroding public trust in the foreign policy establishment. Tremendous amounts of blood and treasure were expended to oust Saddam Hussein, beat back multiple Islamist insurgencies and install a shaky democracy. The ostensible justification for the invasion—Iraq’s purported pursuit of a weapons of mass destruction program—proved to be unfounded. Indeed, in light of all this, the attempt by critics to connect the airstrikes on Iran with the most infamous foreign policy blunder of the 21st century was itself political, designed to sow doubt about Trump’s decision.

The question is whether the analogy is justified. Analogical reasoning in international relations is both extremely common and of extremely variable utility. In his book “Analogies at War,” Singaporean political scientist Yuen Foong Khong warned that policymakers use analogies to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to thinking about policy choices. Analysts and citizens are no different, sometimes going so far as to compare real-life situations to fictional parallels. The danger is that analogies function as poor substitutes for well-developed theory, leading many to extrapolate outcomes without thinking seriously about causal logic.

In the case of the Iran attack, the parallels to Iraq in 2003 are hard to miss. From a 30,000-foot-high perspective, the most obvious one is that the U.S. chose to launch a preventive attack against an enduring rival in the Middle East suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the intelligence that justified the 2003 invasion proved to be mistaken—some would argue intentionally so. Infamously, the administration of then-President George W. Bush presented stovepiped intelligence claiming that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program was active, when it turned out to be long dormant.

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There are echoes of this behavior today. When confronted with a recent U.S. intelligence finding that contradicted his claims that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, Trump told reporters, “I don’t care.” In a televised interview after the attack had taken place, Vice President JD Vance said, “Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who doubles as Trump’s national security adviser, went even further, dismissing the recent finding as “irrelevant” and insisting that the U.S. public should “forget about intelligence.”

Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was ultimately able to prove conclusively that Iraq’s WMD program was long shuttered, because U.S. forces occupied the country. This time around, that is not an option.

Another disturbing parallel with the 2003 Iraq War is the premature declaration of victory. On May 1, 2003, Bush gave his notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, an event his communications director later described as “one of the big regrets of my life.” Similarly, after the airstrikes on Iran, Trump gave a brief White House speech asserting that Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities, particularly the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordow, had been “completely and totally obliterated.” Subsequent reporting in CNN, the New York Times and the Atlantic, however, revealed that a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency finding contradicted Trump’s claims. While the CIA assessment that was then quickly released was more friendly to Trump, subsequent reporting and statements by the director of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency cast doubt on that assessment. The entire back and forth offers a stark reminder about the dangers of politicized intelligence.

Finally, just as with Iraq, the Trump administration’s designs seemed to experience mission creep in the days after the attack. For the Bush administration, Operation Iraqi Freedom was ostensibly about eliminating Saddam Hussein’s WMD program, even if it required regime change to do so. By January 2005, however, Bush’s second inaugural address ratcheted up U.S. aims even further, to promoting democratization across the region—through the use of military force if necessary. Trump has raged against the Iraq War for years, and in the days following the attack on Iran, Vance and Rubio insisted that the administration’s goal was not regime change in Tehran. Yet, almost simultaneously, while acknowledging on social media that regime change was no longer in vogue, Trump suggested that if Iran’s theocratic regime continued on its present course, “why wouldn’t there be a Regime change?” By last week’s NATO summit, Rubio had followed suit, saying that he saw regime change as likely if Iran’s leaders didn’t change course.

The parallels between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2025 clearly exist, which is why it is so tempting to lean on the analogy. But it is important to stress the differences as well, because they point to how things might play out in Iran, in ways that are both better and worse than they did in Iraq a generation ago.

Perhaps the most important distinction is that the attacks on Iran have been limited to an air campaign. As Max Boot noted last week, “there is little chance of either Israel or the United States sending ground troops to invade Iran because of the risk of another quagmire in a nation that has … more than 90 million people,” or twice the population of Iraq. International relations scholars like Robert Pape are extremely skeptical about the utility of air power to achieve foreign policy goals. Without an escalation to the use of ground forces, however, the risk of extended U.S. military involvement in Iran is much lower. In other words, even if Operation Midnight Hammer proves to be a failure, it will be a more modest and less costly failure than Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A related difference is U.S. public opinion about the use of force. The Bush administration launched a concerted, monthslong public relations campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq. The result was that by early 2003, there was bipartisan support in Congress for an attack, and a majority of the U.S. public supported military action as well. Public opinion subsequently soured when it became clear that the “mission accomplished” claim proved to be false. In contrast, the Trump administration barely bothered to make a public case for attacking Iran. Unsurprisingly, then, despite the limited nature of the bombings, a majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the airstrikes. This will also function as an important public constraint on any attempt by the Trump administration to widen the conflict.

Finally, the U.S. was the chief instigator and architect of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the U.S. military shouldering the greatest burden in launching the attack and occupying the country. That is not true this time around. Not only did the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instigate the campaign against Iran, there is some evidence that Israel did so despite Trump’s desire to give more time for negotiations seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program to play out. Indeed, the fact that the United States would not be on the hook for this conflict might be one reason Trump decided to opt in

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Most of the differences between Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2025 suggest lower risks of a foreign policy quagmire this time around. There is, however, one caveat to that conclusion. Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. was ultimately able to prove conclusively that Iraq’s WMD program was long shuttered, because U.S. forces occupied the country. And even with the U.S. military in control on the ground, it took months to do so. This time around, that is not an option. Already, there are considerable doubts about whether Iran’s nuclear program was obliterated or merely suffered a setback. Furthermore, regime change is highly unlikely given the campaign’s exclusive reliance on air power. So those doubts are likely to linger indefinitely.

This means that, in the near future, Iran’s theocratic regime might well possess the means to produce a nuclear weapon. And after Operation Midnight Hammer, it will be strongly incentivized to do so.

Daniel W. Drezner is distinguished professor of international politics and academic dean at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is the author of Drezner’s World.

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