‘It’s not 2003.” So say some fervent Donald Trump supporters who are desperate to distinguish the U.S. attack on Iran from the U.S. invasion of Iraq 23 years ago. And since it’s not 2003, “this is not a time for neocons to be spiking the football.” So said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and, by saying so, inadvertently made the case that the “neocons” he takes to have been responsible for the Iraq War do have excellent reason to spike the football over Iran. The Trump of Roberts’s imagination would never do anything like what the “neocons” of his wild and convenient imaginings cooked up for Iraq. Except that Trump just did.
The United States is now at war with a country whose leaders have been gathering mobs to chant “Death to America” since the Islamic revolution of 1979 and have made good on it ever since by killing Americans within reach of Iran’s power when practical. Let us set aside for now analysis of the curious need of so many to wrench Trump’s bold and surprising decision into alignment with their historically uninformed quest for Marvel-style neocon villains. While we’re at it, let’s set aside consideration of those on the other side of the aisle whose desire for Trump to fail seems more powerful than their desire for their country to succeed. We’re at war, and if it’s too much to ask that the nation unify around the American cause, that’s sad—but such are the times in which we live, and fortunately for all of us, Iran is now in the fearsome hands of the U.S. military.
In truth, it is 2003 again. History rhymes. An American president has had to decide, on the basis of information he has at hand, how to cope with a grave threat to American interests and values. And again, a president has chosen war. Then, it was Iraq. Now, it is Iran. The real surprise is that, geopolitically, the Iraq example has turned out to be a good one for Trump to follow. The dubious origin of that war a generation ago and the epic failure of American-style liberal values to take root in that country have obscured significant aspects of the positive outcome of the conflict. And confusion about the security issues that faced the United States then and that are facing it now is distorting public and elite perceptions of the Iran problem Trump has taken the country to war to address.
When a recent poll of American historians ranked the best and worst American foreign policy decisions of all time, it was a foregone conclusion that going to war in Iraq in 2003 would rank as the worst. And the conclusion was correct. True, 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, and the American military nearly collapsed in its aftermath; estimates of direct civilian deaths in Vietnam ran as high as 2 million and nearly double that regionally; the United States lost Indochina to Communism, and Saigon fell ignominiously. Contrast that with Iraq, where we lost 4,500 killed, after which the U.S. military emerged more capable than ever; where estimates of direct civilian deaths range to 200,000, a tenth of the toll in Vietnam. We tried withdrawing in 2011 but had to go back after the emergence of ISIS, which killed perhaps 100,000 civilians before we and allies destroyed it and saved Iraq and the world from the deadliest innovation of the 2010s. But there you are. It is difficult to talk about Iraq in polite company—on both left and right—in any way other than with acknowledgments of how disastrous, how calamitous, how ruinous it was.
And we all know why.
To review, the Bush administration erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein possessed large stocks of chemical and other weapons—and that he still harbored an intention to develop nuclear weapons, an intention that dated back to the construction of the Osirak nuclear reactor, which Israel destroyed in 1981. We should not waste time on those who claim the Bush administration was consciously lying when it led us into war. This groundless slander actually works to obscure a complex truth. Leaders can make decisions only on the basis of the information they have at the time. But events that follow those decisions compel us to pass judgment on them in light of additional information gleaned in their wake. “If you knew then what you know now” is an inevitable question in retrospect—but it is meaningless when it comes to real-time decision-making. For Bush, in the post-9/11 context, Saddam’s supposed capabilities and ambitions made him too dangerous going forward not to confront and depose.
The second Iraq problem was the failure to anticipate—and once it was underway, to acknowledge—the gathering insurgency inside the country working in opposition to the U.S. occupation and its efforts to install a democratic government. Vice President Dick Cheney said in 2005 the insurgency was in its “last throes.” Unfortunately, it was not, and the U.S. military was increasingly vexed by its inability to solve the lethal problem of improvised explosive devices on roadbeds. Those bombs accounted for about half of all American casualties.
Like many, I supported going to war in Iraq in 2003 on the grounds that Saddam, his weapons stocks, and his ambitions posed an unacceptable risk. Had we known then that the WMD fears were the product of American and allied intelligence failures, which Saddam could have dispelled but chose not to, most of us would have supported the continuation of the Clinton -administration policy of slapping Saddam back even as he probed the determination of the West to hold fast to the limitations on his actions and choices to which he had agreed as a condition of ending the 1991 U.S.-led war against him. But we would have worried about the long-term viability of keeping him in that box. Support at the UN Security Council for the sanctions regime had begun to erode only a few years after it had been imposed. After 9/11, it was also all too easy to imagine him making common cause with, or being an active participant in, the new and indeterminate terrorist threat to the United States (and of course there were those who believed he had been involved in some way with the attack). He certainly had more than sufficient motive.
At the time, many of us embraced the view that America and its allies would be liberating Iraq from Saddam, a vicious tyrant, and, once liberated, that America would have a responsibility to try to establish a decent government for Iraq’s people to replace the malevolent one we took down.
Critics on both left and right have claimed ever since that we went to war for the misbegotten purpose of bringing democracy to Iraq. This view—in part a result of ex post facto foolhardy utopianism that flowed from the feckless pens of the Bush White House’s talented but overenthusiastic rhetoricians—gets the sequence of events wrong. In the absence of serious security concerns about the Saddam regime, there would have been no war and hence no “democracy promotion.” If there is no decision to topple the regime first, there are no questions about what you will replace that regime with. Some hoped the Middle East was ready for a wave of change from autocracy to liberalization and democracy. It wasn’t. But the war aim of the military power the United States deployed was first to oust Saddam, not to democratize the region and the world.
The decision to go to war would have been forever vindicated had the U.S. military indeed turned up large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons—though some might disagree in light of the ensuing insurgency and the cost it inflicted on our troops. In policy circles, a significant number of the war’s initial supporters were ready for a withdrawal by mid-decade as U.S. casualties mounted. They had no stomach by 2007 for Bush’s counterinsurgency “surge.” Yet the surge—in conjunction with the “Anbar awakening,” in which Sunni sheikhs starting in mid-2006 turned against the insurgents of al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied instead with U.S. forces—was a clear success by summer 2008. And the war ended two years later.
If you are George W. Bush, and you took the country to war on the basis of a mistake on the scale of the Iraq WMD intelligence failure, you cannot expect the judgment of history to be other than negative—even though you can honestly claim you made the decision on the basis of what you considered the best information available at the time. At the same time, this negative retrospective judgment offers no real counsel to presidents and policymakers assessing future dangers and making decisions about them. They, too, will have to make incredibly hard choices without perfect information. Trump just did.
And here is the key point when it comes to reassessing our fight in Iraq. Saying history’s judgment of a decision is negative is not the same as sayingthat nothing positive came of the decision. In Iraq, the United States sought militarily to establish with certainty that Saddam Hussein would no longer be a factor in global politics and that Iraq would have no chemical and biological weapons or the ambition or prospect of developing a nuclear weapon. To return to a notorious phrase, “mission accomplished.” Saddam was out, Iraq was free of WMD, and after the surge ended the war, the government in Iraq has posed no threat of any kind to anyone outside its borders. It is a functioning state, though it is shot through with corruption and tribal tangles and internal squabbling that have so far prevented it from securing a bright future. But it’s off the map when it comes to geopolitical hot spots—following a 30-year period during which Iraq was one of the most destabilizing forces for evil on the globe.
It’s impossible to say what would have happened if the United States had left Saddam in place. Clearly, in the short run, he did not pose a threat as a supplier of dangerous weapons to terrorist actors, as we had feared, because he didn’t actually have those weapons. But that is something we came to know only as a result of toppling the regime; the perceived threat would still have been a huge preoccupation for American and Western leaders. That’s not enough to justify the war, but it adds to an honest understanding of why the war came to be.
Saddam in the longer run would have been an entirely different matter. Having played a malevolent role in Iraq and regionally for decades, he would certainly have sought to continue in it to the extent possible. In a grab for oil, he invaded Iran in 1980. He used chemical weapons extensively from 1983 to 1988 in the Iran–Iraq war, and he used them against his own Kurdish population during his Anfal campaign of 1988. In another grab for oil, he invaded and conquered Kuwait in 1990, and he threatened to use chemical weapons (but didn’t) against the U.S.-led coalition that ejected him in 1991. During that first Gulf War, he also launched dozens of Scud missiles against Israel and civilian targets in Saudi Arabia; because he had used them, Israelis spent the war putting on gas masks in case he had loaded them onto his missiles. The fact that, by 2003, Saddam had no stores of chemical or biological weapons was unknown to anyone but himself and whatever “inner circle” he had. The question, which had taken on a new coloration in the aftermath of 9/11, was whether he was too dangerous to ignore, especially if the Security Council allowed the sanctions imposed on him to lapse, giving him more resources.
Saddam was 65 years old when Baghdad fell to the United States. The problems he posed in international politics might have persisted for decades had Baghdad remained in his hands. Instead, those specific problems ended with his regime and his death by hanging three years later. Good riddance.
The Iraq War also had implications beyond Iraq. It was intended in part to scare others out of pursuing and possessing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Under some circumstances, the United States has the military capability to prevent hostile states from acquiring especially dangerous military capabilities. The question of whether such an adversary would actually use such capabilities once it possesses them doesn’t arise if the state doesn’t possess them.
Did this added deterrent dimension of the Iraq War work? There’s evidence to suggest it did.
At the end of 2003—that is, after the fall of the Saddam regime—Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi made the decision to abandon his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs as well as long-range missile development. International inspectors verified their termination in 2004.
Syria also had a nuclear program underway when war broke out. Construction had begun in 2001 on a facility at al-Kibar modeled on a reactor in North Korea that could produce enough plutonium for one or two nuclear weapons per year. Syria insisted the project was not a nuclear reactor at all but a conventional military facility. When reports of a contract with Russia to build a reactor in Syria surfaced in February 2003, during the buildup before the U.S. attack on Iraq, both Russia and Syria hastily denied any such arrangement—which was likely an indication of newfound caution in the wake of America’s declared determination that it would intervene if nuclear threats began to gather rather than wait until it was too late to do so. As the al-Kibar facility neared completion in 2007, Israel bombed and destroyed it. Subsequent inspections found incontrovertible evidence of al-Kibar’s nuclear nature. After its destruction, Syria’s nuclear ambitions went dark, perhaps in keeping with a sense of the heightened risk of proceeding. (Syria did use chemical weapons against its own people in 2013, which Barack Obama had declared a “red line” requiring intervention—a line from which he hastily retreated when the test came.)
Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear-weapons-development program underwent a shift in 2003. The mullahs dispersed its elements and moved it underground. A 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate found that 2003 was a turning point—a conclusion subsequently confirmed by the release in 2008 of internal Iranian documents by the chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those documents offered information about Iran’s pre-2003 “Project Amad,” a detailed plan to develop nuclear weapons and configure them as missile warheads. In 2018, Israel’s Mossad seized another cache of nuclear records further describing the Amad project’s ambition to produce a small arsenal by the early 2000s. That didn’t happen. In short, while Iran by no means gave up its nuclear ambitions and programs after the U.S. took down Saddam’s regime, Iran’s leaders understood that their pursuits entailed greater risk in light of Bush’s determination to deal with the nuclear threats before they took full root. The shifts they felt they had to make likely slowed their progress.
Then there is the case of North Korea. The Kim regime’s pursuit of a nuclear arsenal had been underway for decades by 9/11, and Pyongyang was getting very close. The United States made that clear in 2002, when Washington openly announced we had been played for suckers—that a decade of Western bribes (called “the agreed framework”) paid to North Korea to prevent nuclearization had failed. Given that fact, and the fact that in 2003, the United States had successfully ousted Saddam, North Korea did the opposite of Libya. It rushed ahead, and by 2005 openly announced it had achieved nuclear-weapons capability—then conducted a successful underground test in 2006. The Bush administration did not act. It had its hands full with Iraq. But there was a unique feature of the situation on the Korean peninsula: thousands of conventional munitions the North has had at the ready for decades to fire off at South Korea’s capital, Seoul, which is less than 40 miles from North Korean territory. The United States was thus conventionally deterred from military action to halt or slow North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.
The prospect of conventional weapons deterring the United States from attacking an aspiring nuclear-weapons state is a good vantage point from which to return to the Iran of 2026. Iran’s ability in the days following the U.S.-Israeli attack to fire off barrages of missiles and drones is an indication of where the problem of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program was headed: in the direction of a conventional Iranian deterrent to the ability of the United States or Israel to do anything about it. Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu specifically said that Israel had determined it had to strike when it did because Iran’s increasing conventional short-range missile capacity would soon make such an attack too dangerous—the North Korea problem.
The United States had considerably damaged the Iranian nuclear-weapons program with its June 2025 attack, in conjunction with Israel, on Fordow and other nuclear facilities. And the United States and Israel could perhaps have continued to strike as necessary while Iran built replacement facilities over time. But not indefinitely if Iranian conventional capabilities continued to increase rapidly. As of late 2025, the path to an Iranian nuclear arsenal no longer ran underground but through the skies, in the form of missiles and drones.
That Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons is not in doubt—on the strength of vastly more evidence than the intelligence case against Saddam Hussein. Iran’s single-mindedness in its quest is unique in international politics. Its threats to wipe out Israel have been nonstop, and they extend to the “Great Satan,” the United States. Through its direct and indirect actions against U.S. interests—whether supplying sophisticated roadside bombs to insurgents in Iraq or its support for numerous Middle East malefactors from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis—the regime in Iran has conclusively demonstrated that it is as dangerous as a nonnuclear-weapons state can be, and there is every reason to doubt that an Iranian nuclear weapon would be useful to the regime only as a defensive deterrent. Given Iran’s embrace of Shiite millenarianism, it’s an open question whether the nuclear weapons Israel and the United States possess would deter Iranian use.
Trump has not been alone in saying Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. The “international community” says so as well. But such declarations are largely performative in the absence of the power to back them up. This Trump commands. Once among the harshest critics of the decision to go to war in Iraq, Trump has found that the information he has at his disposal has obliged him to take the country to war over a threat from Iran—a threat that is analogous to, but far more serious than, the one George W. Bush perceived in Iraq.
No, “it’s not 2003.” It’s a generation later, and the problem of the worst weapons in the hands of the worst state actors persists. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was one. It is no longer. Donald Trump has made it clear he is determined to make sure the Islamic Republic follows the Baath regime into the dustbin of history. It’s likely that one person in America who is rooting him on, based on his own complex and rueful experience, is George W. Bush.