Beware the similarities between the wars in Iraq and Trump’s Iran war

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 2026, Trump told Americans in June that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. There is no evidence Tehran will be able to reconstitute the program in the foreseeable, or even the long term — so there was no “imminent threat” from Iran.

Today, as in 2003, the U.S. president has trouble clarifying the strategic goals of this war, or any plans for “the day after” the war stops. Trump’s aides say the aim is to destroy Iran’s military capacity with airstrikes, without sending in ground troops or conducting “regime change.”

Yet, POTUS is nurturing fantasies of regime change on the cheap. One day, he urges Iranian civilians to rise up and overthrow the regime, although they are likely to get slaughtered. The next, he demands the right to personally choose Iran’s next leader.

Such self-delusion propelled Americans to disaster in Iraq. 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.

Few Iranians will mourn the demise of the cruel and murderous Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or his cohorts, and a large segment of Iranians wants the corrupt religious regime gone. But Trump’s treacly protestations of sympathy with brave Iranian civilian protesters ring hollow.

All signs point to his willingness to abandon them if he needs a quick exit from his war as the U.S. supply of missile and drone interceptors runs short in the next few weeks.

This potential betrayal of Iranian hopes hits my gut hard because I watched similar scenarios play out when I covered the 1991 and 2003 wars in Iraq.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush called for Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to revolt against Hussein (whose mainly Sunni followers controlled Iraq). As the United States pushed into southern Iraq from liberated Kuwait, those Iraqis followed his call.

But Bush 41 chose not to continue on to Baghdad and depose the Iraqi regime; his advisers (rightly) warned this would spark an Iraqi civil war in which the U.S. would become entangled. When U.S. forces left, Hussein’s army slaughtered around 10,000 Shiites; several hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq’s north fled into the freezing mountains in winter, until the U.S. Air Force established a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan, and they could return home.

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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 (no-longer-existent) Iraqi nuclear program — and bring democracy to the country.

It was hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm of Iraqi Kurds for the regime change the Americans were finally promising.

America’s regional allies, especially Israel, urged Bush to decapitate the Baghdad regime. White House hawks insisted “regime change” would quickly bring peace and democracy to the entire Mideast. So did exiled members of multiple Iraqi opposition groups, with whom I had been in contact since covering the 1991 Gulf War.

Bush 43 disbanded Iraq’s military and fired much of its government. But the White House had no grasp of the complex ethnic and religious politics of Iraq, which engulfed U.S. forces and ignited an internal Iraqi civil war between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. U.S. troops were caught in the middle, as Bush 41 had feared.

Fast-forward to Trump. He says he won’t put U.S. boots on the ground but also says he’s not ruling them out “if they were necessary.” (“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he said Monday. Figure that one out.)

However, the president has made clear, for now, that he won’t send U.S. troops to help unarmed Iranians retake their country, even as he keeps urging them to overthrow their leaders.

That may prevent the 2003-style quagmire Bush 43 blundered into. Yet, POTUS appears even blinder than Bush in Iraq about his ability to bend Iran’s future to his will.

Even though Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed by an Israeli airstrike, along with dozens of other Iranian leaders, that’s not likely to end the regime.

The president has shown little interest — and advanced no concrete plans — for the future of Iran after the U.S. and Israel stop bombing. Trump has upturned the famous doctrine that the late Secretary of State Colin Powell applied to 2003 Iraq, namely, “If you break it, you own it.” The Trump Doctrine posits: “We break it, you own it. Goodbye and good luck.”

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POTUS has stressed it is up to Iran’s people to rise and take over their country, even though civilians are bereft of leaders, organization, guns, or even internet connections (and Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah, who hasn’t set foot in Iran for decades, has no armed forces of his own).

Squeezed by the MAGA faithful and partial to quick hits, Trump insists there will be no long-term U.S. involvement. This may avoid U.S. military casualties, but will probably leave Iran in chaos, ruled by regime holdouts who still retain the guns.

Indeed, the strongest remaining military force in Iran is the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is deeply rooted throughout the country. Behind them are hundreds of thousands of Basij militiamen, who have already killed thousands of unarmed regime opponents.

Perhaps Trump has devised a magical formula to profit from any such bleak denouement for the Iranian people: Iran will become Venezuela.

Trump has told journalists he wants to model his Iran venture on the U.S. intervention in Caracas, where the top leader, Nicolás Maduro, was kidnapped, and U.S. officials then made a deal with his vice president. Trump eliminated a dictator he disliked, but left in place the previous regime, which, in turn, handed him control over Venezuelan oil.

Sorry, even the most ill-informed observer can grasp that Iran bears no resemblance to Venezuela: The Islamic regime retains deep roots, many hard-line generals, hundreds of thousands of ideological purists, and many religious followers; it isn’t a one-man show.

Yet, POTUS insisted again Thursday that “what we did in Venezuela is the perfect scenario.” In an Axios interview, he said that he, personally, had “to be involved in the appointment [of Khamenei’s replacement] like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela.”

In a godlike pronouncement, Trump expects Iran’s hard-line Shiite religious clerics to pick a new supreme leader who pleases him. Or what? He’ll send them to heaven as martyrs?

The president has already noted that “most people” he had considered for Iran’s top job “are dead” from the recent U.S.- Israel bombing. He speculated that Iran’s future leader could be “as bad” as the last.

More likely, Trump will try to cook a deal with a senior Iranian official, perhaps an IRGC general, to eliminate the remnants of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its missile production. Perhaps he dreams of U.S. control of Iranian oil revenue as arranged with Venezuela’s new leader. Perhaps visions of “great U.S. deals” for Iranian oil dance like dollar signs in his head.

However, hard-line IRGC generals are more likely to fight to the end to hold power at home, even as Iran’s proxy militias in surrounding Arab countries are crushed. IRGC generals who were willing to gun down tens of thousands of Iranian civilians during recent Iranian protests would surely do so again to survive.

I worry that Trump’s continued call for a civilian uprising holds out the prospect that Iranian civilians will once again be mowed down — even as the president declares victory and sends the U.S. fleet home when his MAGA followers grow antsy. Israel may continue bombing, but that won’t help Iranian protesters topple the regime.

In a further sign of how the administration may use and abuse Iranians, news reports claim the CIA is arming Iranian Kurds to spark a wider uprising. This is cynicism to the max! Encouraging Iran’s ethnic minorities — Kurds, Azeris, Baluch, and Sunni Arabs — to fight will foment internal civil wars without changing the central regime or delivering a better one. Only a unified Iranian opposition can ultimately achieve that.

For POTUS, the Iran war is an exhibition of Trumpian power designed to bolster his strongman image, as the GOP faces dicey midterms and the Jeffrey Epstein hangover at home. For Iran’s people, Trump’s reality show is a life-threatening matter. His “we break it, you fix it” doctrine could consign many of them to death as he celebrates U.S. bomb strikes back home.