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 United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American deaths later, the Iraq war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.
The specter 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 the Middle East, 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 U.S. 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 the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. 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.”
And once again the nation is waiting for a president to decide. “I may do it, I may not do it, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday when asked about his thinking on striking Iranian nuclear facilities.
There are the familiar questions about an endgame. Mr. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and under a “Mission Accomplished” banner he triumphantly declared combat operations in Iraq were at an end. But the country was in chaos as he spoke.
Today many American officials fear there will be a wider war if the United States bombs Fordo, including retaliatory attacks on U.S. bases in the region by pro-Iran militias and strikes on ships in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Adm. William F. Fallon, who in 2007 and 2008 oversaw all American military operations in the Middle East as head of U.S. Central Command, said on Wednesday that he had concerns about Iran spiraling out of control after an American strike.
“What’s the plan?” he said. “What’s the strategy? What’s the desired end state? Iran not having a nuclear weapon is something few people would disagree with. But what is the relationship we would have with Iran in the bigger Middle East? We’re just knee-jerking.’’
One person who sees little similarity between the run up to Iraq and now is David H. Petraeus, the general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion in Baghdad. “This is clearly the potential run up to military action, but it’s not the invasion of a country,” he said on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and order him to agree to the complete dismantlement of his nuclear program or face “the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people.” If the supreme leader rejects the ultimatum, Mr. Petraeus said, “that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens.”
Mr. Nasr said a hopeful scenario after a strike would be the total destruction of Fordo and an Iran that comes to the table and agrees to a negotiated end to its nuclear program. But if the Iranians respond militarily, as they say they will, Mr. Nasr said that Mr. Trump would be compelled to counterattack, particularly if Americans are killed on U.S. bases in the region.
“And then you don’t know where it’s going to stop, and Trump is really risking a repeat of the Iraq war,” he said. Iran is larger than Iraq, he noted, with a population of roughly 90 million and a far more capable, nationalistic military than the Iraqi army.
John Bolton, a neoconservative who served as one of Mr. Trump’s first term national security advisers, was a big advocate for the war in Iraq, and is now a supporter of a U.S. attack on Iran.
“Bomb Fordo and be done with it,” he said on Wednesday. “I think this is long overdue.’’
Mr. Bolton wrote a book about his time working for Mr. Trump that enraged the president, and Mr. Trump retaliated by revoking Mr. Bolton’s Secret Service protection, despite death threats that Mr. Bolton faces from Iran.
The two no longer speak, so Mr. Bolton said he had no idea what Mr. Trump would decide. He was not sure if Mr. Trump knew himself. But in his experience, Mr. Bolton said, Mr. Trump was “frantic and agitated” in national security crises.
“He talks to a lot of people and he’s looking for somebody who will say the magic words,” Mr. Bolton said. “He’ll hear something and he’ll decide, ‘That’s right, that’s what I believe.’ Which lasts until he has the next conversation.”
Elisabeth Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The Times. She was most recently Washington bureau chief. Previously she covered the Pentagon, the White House, the 2008 McCain campaign and City Hall for The Times.
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