President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the Capitol on Tuesday in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump might never have been president but for an Iraq War backlash that shattered trust in establishment leaders.
So it’s ironic he may be emulating some of the rhetorical positions and strategic miscalculations that led President George W. Bush into disaster in the Middle East after 2003.
Trump has reportedly made no decision on whether to strike Iran. But his huge naval and air power buildup in the region is the biggest since the Iraq invasion that toppled President Saddam Hussein.
This could give leverage to force an Iranian climbdown in crisis talks that resume in Geneva on Thursday. But absent an enormous diplomatic breakthrough, ordering such a force home without firing a shot would buckle Trump’s prestige.
The Trump administration was founded on the MAGA movement’s allergy to foreign quagmires. This may explain why it’s made few coherent arguments for a war it’s threatening to fight.
But the downside to this approach is that while America’s military may be prepared for war, the public is not.
Before invading Iraq, Bush spent months making the case for war — albeit one based on faulty intelligence and false premises. Trump’s administration has only offered only opaque and confusing justifications.
Trump did offer marginally more clarity in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, although this may have come at the cost of painting himself further into a corner.
He repeated standard presidential warnings that Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear bomb. In his case, however, this raised doubts about his motives and honesty, since he claimed to have “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program last year. Trump also highlighted hundreds of US combat deaths in Iraq caused by Iran-backed proxies. He bemoaned the brutal recent crackdown on Iranian protesters that may have killed thousands of civilians.
The missile conundrum
But historic echoes were loudest when he turned to Iran’s ballistic missiles. “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America,” Trump said.
He may be overstating Iran’s capabilities. But by invoking threats to the homeland, he followed a controversial path taken by the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government to justify the Iraq War.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a similar warning on Wednesday.
“You’ve seen them increasing the range of the missiles they have now, and clearly they are headed in the pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental US,” Rubio said. “They already possess weapons that could reach much of Europe already now as we speak. And the ranges continue to grow every single year exponentially, which is amazing to me.”
This all sounds familiar.
In Cincinnati in 2002, Bush said American civilians in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations were at risk from Iraqi missiles. He even claimed Iraq was exploring ways of using drones that could disperse chemical and biological agents on “missions targeting the United States.” That same year, Vice President Dick Cheney warned in Nashville that Iraq threatened US allies in the Middle East with missiles and was seeking the “whole range” of delivery systems that could eventually “subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”
Missile fearmongering is not the only reason for Iraq War nostalgia. One of the Bush administration’s worst failings was its blasé negligence in planning for the aftermath of a war that led to sectarian splintering and an insurgency.
Iran is arguably a more robust state than Iraq. But Trump is yet to level with Americans about what might happen if any US military action topples the Iranian clerical regime.
In a new profile Wednesday, CNN reported that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is unable to predict the result of regime change in Tehran. And sources told CNN earlier this month that the US intelligence community believes the most likely candidate to fill a leadership void would be the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So ousting theocrats in Tehran might just lead to an equally radical anti-US replacement that would not measurably improve US or regional security.
The Trump administration has history on regime change after toppling Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year. But the chances seem remote that it could find an Iranian equivalent of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez to coerce into acting on Washington’s interests.
US foreign policy has often foundered over failed calculations about how adversaries will behave. The logic of Washington often dissolves on contact with hot and dusty Middle Eastern air.
The current administration seems beset by similar misunderstandings, despite Trump’s warning in Saudi Arabia last year that Iraq War-era “interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
This month, US envoy Steve Witkoff said the president couldn’t fathom why Iran didn’t just cave to his pressure. “He’s curious as to why they haven’t … I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated,” Witkoff told Fox News.
Witkoff continued: “Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do’?”
Here’s one possible reason. Iran has watched the brutal fall of dictators who lacked weapons of mass destruction, like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. It’s hardly rocket science that it would want to keep weapons to guarantee regime survival.
Hubris is a danger now, as it was in 2003.
The Iraq War was expected to be a “shock and awe” breeze, and US troops expected to be greeted as liberators. More than 20 years later, Trump showed he expects a cakewalk in Iran after knocking down reports that Caine is stressing the complexity of any war. “If a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday.
These words may be worth remembering.
What kind of deal can Trump accept?
Diplomacy is not dead yet, however. Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law and freelance fixer Jared Kushner are expected to lead Thursday’s proximity talks with Iranian officials, brokered by Oman.
The outcome of diplomacy may hinge on whether Iran is prepared to offer concessions to Trump that he can bill as a significant capitulation.
Tehran has shown some signs it will compromise on enriching uranium or on stockpiles of weapons-grade material. But missiles could be a dealbreaker.
And Trump has domestic political constraints. He can hardly embrace a nuclear pact that looks anything like the Obama-era caps on Iran’s nuclear program, which he trashed. That said, he’s a master at spinning a defeat into a win, like when Europe balked at his demands to hand over Greenland in January. But Iran will be under no illusions. After all, any outcome of the current confrontation that leaves the regime in place is a win for Tehran.
This is why military action may be so tantalizing for Trump, despite the potential loss of US service personnel in combat and the possibility of high civilian casualties.
A US soldier watches as a statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad April 9, 2003.
If the US is ever going to strike its sworn foe, now might be the moment, with the regime’s regional terror networks shattered in wars with Israel and with economic and political unrest festering inside Iran.
The eradication of Iran’s missile and nuclear programs wouldn’t just spare Israel from the Islamic Republic’s threats of extinction. It could reshape the Middle East and unleash economic development in Iran, in the Gulf and elsewhere.
This is a core Trump foreign policy goal. “After so many decades of conflict, finally it is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about — a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation, and achievement right here in the Middle East,” he said in Saudi Arabia last year.
Destroying Iran’s regime would keep Trump’s promise to protesters after he said the US was “locked and loaded” to protect them. And it would rob China of another member of its axis of influence after the US coopted Venezuela.
So, while US military disasters of the early 2000s offer stark omens, the president may still seize his opportunity.
He could become the president who ousted the Ayatollahs, a feat that eluded Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.That would be some legacy for a commander in chief desperate for a place in history.
