Don’t Forget Iraq: The Enduring Legacy of the War on Terror
By Nizar Masri
History does not quite repeat itself, but the parallels between the Iraq War and what U.S. officials deem to be a “special military operation” in Iran are hard not to notice. In the 25 years since Bush and Cheney wielded the military as their personal mercenaries in the name of enriching defense and oil executives, not much has changed.
On Feb. 28, in the midst of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran in Geneva, Israel and the United States launched "decapitation strikes" on Iran. The strikes targeted key officials, military commanders, and facilities. Notably, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Mohammad Pakpour, were killed.
Concurrently, Israel launched a ground and air incursion into Lebanon against Hezbollah, a Lebanese paramilitary organization with close ties to Iran. To date the invasion has displaced 1.2 million people and has killed over 2,000 according to the World Health Organization.
Within the first hour of U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School was hit by an airstrike during school hours. An investigation by Amnesty International indicated that a Tomahawk cruise missile, a precision-guided missile used almost exclusively by the U.S., was likely used for the attack. A total of 168 people were killed. This attack mirrors the brutality of strikes on civilian infrastructure during the Iraq War.
Public support for attacking Iran is low and will continue to decline as death tolls climb and consumers are forced to grapple with increasing prices across the board as a result of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which enables the transit of 20% of the world’s oil and 30% of global seaborne fertilizer.
Only 40% of American voters support the current military action in Iran, while a whopping 74% oppose escalating and sending ground troops into the country. In contrast, 72% of voters supported the war in Iraq at its inception. Although the public did change their tune in 2007 — a New York Times poll found that 61% of Americans believed the U.S. “should have stayed out” of Iraq.
As a nation, we claim to have learned a lesson from Iraq, about hubris, war, and the futility of building peace with death. This lesson came at the cost of more than half a million people who died in the Iraq war from 2003-2011. Which makes the recent aggression against Iran that came in the midst of negotiations all the more tragic.
In a 2016 presidential debate, President Donald Trump himself commented that, “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake.” Even going so far as to say that, “we should never have been in Iraq, we have destabilized the Middle East,” and that “They lied they said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none and they knew there were none.”
Despite these comments, in his statement on the Iran attacks on Feb. 28, he remarked that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon, and that the regime must be toppled due to Iranian refusal to cease development of a nuclear weapon.
Iran has formally committed via the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to not develop or acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018. Following last year's strikes on Iran, an article was posted to the official White House webpage titled, “Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated — and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.” Furthermore, Ayatollah Khamenei issued a religious ruling (or fatwa, in Arabic) in 2003 that declared nuclear weapons to be forbidden. Two years later, in August 2005, the fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
Despite the two week ceasefire brokered between the U.S. and Iran on April 8, war still rages on in Lebanon, transit through the Strait of Hormuz is severely limited, and both sides are no closer to an end to hostilities than they were in 2015. After the first round of negotiations in Pakistan failed on April 12 President Trump announced a naval blockade of Iran, a move that can only escalate an already fraught situation.
U.S. involvement in Iraq continues today, and the region is still ridden with instability and violence even after multiple costly and deadly engagements. The notion that Iran, a nation which is twice as populous, can project power onto a global shipping route and is littered with arduous terrain can be toppled quickly with no blowback is not only arrogant but incredibly dangerous. If we forget the events of Iraq and do not take the off-ramp and deescalate we are doomed to repeat our bloody and shameful history indefinitely.