By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
The arguments against the 2003 invasion are irrelevant to today’s threat. They serve instead to let the “woke right” invoke antisemitic tropes about Jews manipulating Trump.
Pundits, like generals, seem always doomed to refight the last war. That’s the main thing to remember as the world watches the debate over whether the United States should join Israel in action to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire a nuclear weapon. Such weapons have nothing to do with civilian use and everything to do with attempting to perpetrate another Holocaust or to threaten American allies in the Middle East.
For those who oppose action against Iran, the main argument is the obligation not to repeat the mistakes of 2003, when the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq. For many on the political right, the Iraq War—and to a lesser extent, the war begun in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks—were the great original sins of 21st-century American foreign policy. While there were reasonable arguments for American involvement in both conflicts—the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and Taliban government in Afghanistan were both despotic, and supported and exported terrorism—they ultimately were undone by the basic problem of sustaining a long-term commitment to wage an unpopular war in a country where the inhabitants did not want America to stay.
Lessons of war in Iraq
Iraq was particularly problematic because the rationale for the conflict was based on a massive intelligence failure. Most of the world, including the American intelligence establishment, believed Saddam when he boasted about possessing weapons of mass destruction. Sitting back and waiting for him to use them was thought to be a catastrophic mistake. That the administration also believed that it could help transform the Middle East by bringing democracy to an Arab and Muslim world in desperate need of it only strengthened the argument for intervention.
While it was easy to believe that a monster like the Iraqi dictator might be working on nuclear or chemical weapons and had, in the past, done so, those programs were, in fact, no longer operating.
Those who claim that Bush “lied” America into waging war were wrong. It was a genuine mistake, and one that most people in both major U.S. political parties readily believed. But it was still wrong. And when the initial success of the invasion led inevitably to a long-running bloody mess involving attempting to quell an Islamist insurrection fueled by Iran, the universal support for the war evaporated. It also turned out that Iraqis, like the Afghans, weren’t ready to embrace Jeffersonian democracy and wouldn’t fight for it even if they did.
A conviction that this sort of mistake should not be repeated was, in part, what helped drive the takeover of the Republican Party on the part of President Donald Trump. Establishment Republicans, tainted by their support for the war, were swept aside by Trump and his MAGA enthusiasts.
Those few who still cling to the notion that the Iraq War was a noble, if doomed, cause are wrong. Nation-building and the promotion of democracy became toxic terms that embodied the hubris of the Bush administration. That the destruction of Iraq immeasurably strengthened and emboldened the even more dangerous Islamist regime in Iran was more reason to swear off such follies for the foreseeable future.
The errors of Bush and his advisers provide us with lessons on what mistakes not to make. The problem with history, however, is that, clichés to the contrary, it doesn’t repeat itself. And an obsession with avoiding the great blunders of the immediate past generation is very often the pathway to committing even worse ones in the present.
History doesn’t repeat itself
History is replete with examples of military leaders who prepared for the next conflict based on the strategies and tactics that won the previous war that embroiled their countries. The most famous is perhaps that of the French generals who built the Maginot Line, a set of immobile fortifications that would have been useful during the trench warfare of World War I, only to see the armies of the German Nazis simply go around them when defeating them during the Second World War.
In foreign policy, the same principle applies.
A generation of American strategists feared being branded as the second coming of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich. But not every choice facing a democracy is similar to that of Britain and France at Munich in 1938, when they sacrificed Czechoslovakia to prevent another world war, only to embolden Hitler and ensure that it would soon come under worse circumstances. Unfortunately, that led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s to believe that they had to take a stand against Communist aggression in Southeast Asia, which led to the catastrophe in Vietnam.
In turn, the need to avoid another Vietnam created a different set of mistakes. President Jimmy Carter came into office in 1977, speaking of how America had to overcome an “inordinate fear of communism.” But that was just an excuse for a weak foreign policy that led the Soviet Union to engage in adventures around the globe, including its invasion of Afghanistan.
Linked to that was a belief on Carter’s part that the United States must be fastidious about the morals of its allies. That led him to abandon the Shah of Iran in 1979 and set in motion the events that led to that country falling into the hands of Islamist fanatics, who have spent the next 46 years plotting and carrying out terrorist mayhem against the West, Israel and Jewish communities around the world.
And that brings us to America’s present dilemma with respect to Iran.
A growing threat
For a generation since Bush blundered into Iran, the Islamist regime’s quest for a nuclear weapon—so it could accomplish its stated intention of carrying out a genocide against Israel and intimidate American allies in the region—has haunted American foreign policymakers. Led by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Democrats sought to appease Tehran with a 2015 nuclear deal that, far from stopping them from acquiring a weapon, guaranteed that it would get one.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, he rightly rejected that accord. And so he began, albeit belatedly, a “maximum pressure” campaign intended to use sanctions to force the Islamist regime to give up its nuclear program. Trump’s defeat in 2020, followed by Biden’s renewed efforts at appeasement, ensured that this initiative would not be allowed to play out.
In the meantime, Iran cheated on the 2015 agreement and, using the relaxation of sanctions and the release of billions in frozen funds, edged ever closer to achieving its nuclear ambition. By the time Trump returned to office in January of this year, its leaders were already on the verge of a breakout to a bomb.
Trump responded to this challenge by giving Iran a chance to negotiate a way out of the impasse, but not to retain a path to a bomb. The Iranians, thinking they could, as they did with Obama and Biden, talk their way to a diplomatic victory, didn’t take the hint. And once the International Atomic Energy Agency certified in May that they were again engaged in secret illegal nuclear activity, and Israeli intelligence reportedly came to the conclusion that they were about to race toward assembling a bomb, the West and Israel were left with a difficult choice.
To their credit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t hesitate to act, and Trump—whose 60-day window for negotiations had just expired—didn’t try to stop him.
Iran had already launched a multi-front war against the Jewish state when its terrorist allies in Gaza launched a Hamas-led assault on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, followed by attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. But after Israel’s defeat of Hezbollah and the collapse of the regime of Iran’s Syrian ally, Bashar Assad, in 2024, as well as the destruction of its air defenses after it launched missiles against Israel last spring, the regime was more vulnerable than ever.
If the Iranian nuclear threat is to be comprehensively squelched, however, that may require the United States to get involved.
Of course, the Trump administration is already part of this war.
Unlike Obama and Biden, who vetoed an Israeli attack on Iran, Trump decided not to pressure the Israelis from defending themselves. He has continued to supply the arms and ammunition Jerusalem needs to fight Hamas in Gaza, as well as Iran. And the United States has helped defend the Israelis against Iran’s indiscriminate firing of missiles against civilian targets in the Jewish state.
Nevertheless, it may require the use of American B-2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound bombs to destroy the Iranian mountainside enrichment site at the Fordow enrichment facility.
Antisemitic and antiwar
And that prospect has sent some on the right off the deep end.
For the “woke right” faction, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, any action against Iran is an unforgivable sin. His stand rests in part on the hysterical obsession he and other even more extreme and antisemitic figures like far-right political commentator Candace Owens have about opposing Israel and appeasing those who wish to destroy it.
While they would oppose any gesture of support for Israel, their primary argument is citing the lessons of Iraq. They believe that any involvement in the struggle against an Islamist regime, whose raison d’être has always involved hatred for the United States and which has engaged in bloody terrorism against Americans, is nevertheless just another “forever war” to be avoided, like Iraq and Afghanistan. They recycle debunked leftist arguments claiming that Iran isn’t working toward a bomb and, incongruously, believe that the Jewish state is responsible for all of the antisemitic hatred that the mullahs have directed toward it throughout the sordid history of their theocratic regime.
They have also adapted old left-wing arguments for appeasing Iran promoted by the Obama administration—voiced again by The New York Times on June 19—and thrown in antisemitic tropes about the Jews manipulating and dragging the United States into an unnecessary war.
But the claim that a limited bombing campaign against Iran is another Iraq War is bad policy and bad history.
Unlike Bush, Trump has no interest in making Iran democratic or in nation-building there. Nor is he contemplating a ground war invasion. As with the proposed effort to deal with Fordow, any effort by a weak and desperate Iran to attack Americans in the region can be dealt with by air and drone strikes, like those that Trump unleashed in his first term to defeat ISIS, and not a “boots on the ground” strategy.
The costs of inaction
Could there be unintended consequences of a decision to bomb Iran?
Yes, there are a lot of things that might go wrong. But none of them resemble the problems that America confronted in Iraq or Afghanistan. And the gravity of all such scenarios must be weighed against the likely far higher cost of inaction, both for American interests and allies.
The malign motives of isolationists who oppose action against Iran are made obvious by their lack of concern about the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack against Israel. They are not “America First” so much as they are “America alone.” That is both morally dubious and shortsighted in a dangerous world where Islamists see their war on Israel as the first step toward another conflict with the “Great Satan” of the United States.
Trump is right to stand by Israel and castigate the likes of Carlson as “kooky” for not understanding that preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon is an “America First” imperative. Carlson, who is more of a court jester to Trump than an adviser, cravenly called to apologize to the president for his act of lèse majesté. Trump also correctly declared that the only way out for Iran is an “unconditional surrender,” which would mean giving up their nuclear program. Not settling for anything less than that doesn’t involve fighting a “forever war” or “nation-building.”
There is no need to relitigate the Iraq War. Citing that mistake as a reason to commit another one by letting a dangerous regime in Iran off the hook is a classic example of not just mislearning the lessons of the past but confronting a contemporary challenge with the tactics needed to prevail in a past one.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
