President Donald Trump and his administration insist their war of choice in Iran bears zero similarity to the bitter Iraq War the U.S. plunged into 23 years ago. I disagree.
Both wars were based on lies about imminent threats from nuclear weapons to justify wars of choice.
In 2003, the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program was cherry picked and false.
In 2025, Trump himself told Americans that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in June, and there is no evidence that Tehran is able to reconstitute the program — so there was no “imminent threat” to America.
The new White House line that Israeli pressure prompted Trump’s decision to bomb, has already been rejected by the president (although it may contain several kernels of truth).
In 2003 as today, the U.S. president had trouble clarifying the strategic goals of the war. Unlike George W. Bush, Trump denies he seeks “regime change” (after calling for it). But then as now, there was little to no preparation for “the day after” the war ends.
Such lack of vision propelled Americans to disaster in Iraq, even with some competent advisers in the White House. As Trump directs policy solo, based on whim and ill-informed whispers from Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, it’s hard to see a happy ending in Iran.
Yet, having covered the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War (in all its phases through 2017), what I find most tragic is the potential for ordinary Iranians to be harmed as badly by Trump as Iraqis were hurt by Bush’s war.
Few Iranians will mourn the demise of the cruel and murderous Ayatollah Khamenei or his cohorts, and a large segment of Iranians want the corrupt religious regime gone. But despite Trump’s treacly protestations of sympathy with the brave Iranian civilians whom he keeps urging to rise and overthrow the ayatollahs, all signs point to his willingness to abandon them if he needs a quick exit from his new war.
It is this aspect of Trump’s Iran war that hits me hardest in the gut, because I saw it happen before in Iraq.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush called for Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to revolt against Saddam Hussein (whose mainly Sunni followers controlled Iraq), as the United States pushed into southern Iraq from liberated Kuwait. They followed his call.
But Bush 41 chose not to continue on to Baghdad and depose the Iraqi regime, because his advisers warned this would set off an Iraqi civil war.
Moreover, he left much of Hussein’s army intact, along with their attack helicopters. Around 10,000 Shiites were slaughtered.
In February 2003, I crossed from Iran into Iraqi Kurdistan to await the invasion of Iraq by Bush 43, who claimed he had to destroy the (non-existent) Iraqi nuclear program and bring democracy to the country. At the time, it was hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm of Iraqi Kurds for the regime change the Americans were promising in Baghdad.
America’s regional allies, especially Israel, urged us to decapitate the Baghdad dictatorship — and White House hawks insisted “regime change” would quickly bring peace and democracy to the entire Mideast.
Bush disbanded Iraq’s military and fired much of its government. But he had no grasp of the complex ethnic and religious politics of Iraq, which engulfed U.S. forces and created an internal Iraq civil war between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
