Iran Is Not Iraq, the American Raid Is Not a War

West Point Professor John Spencer takes issue with all those pundits and self-proclaimed security experts who insist that the American bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites is akin to the war we waged against Iran for eight years, and, they warn us, is leading us inexorably into another costly “forever war.” Spencer explains all the ways that the comparison fails to hold. “No, US strikes on Iran are not the start of a new ‘forever war’ in the Middle East – opinion,” by John Spencer, Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2025:

We are hearing it again. From the random comedian turned geopolitical analyst, the podcast influencer, and the back seat foreign policy expert. “Remember Iraq,” they say. “Forever war.”

As if that one phrase ends the conversation. The uninformed reflex is to think of years of troop deployments, endless insurgencies, wasted lives, and strategic quagmires. The instinct is understandable. But it risks misreading the moment we are in. Because Iran is not Iraq. It is not Afghanistan. And this is not the same war.

Israel and the United States are not talking about regime change. That is not the mission. The mission is clear and limited. It is to irreversibly destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That is it. Not to occupy Tehran. Not to rebuild Iran’s government. Not to democratize the Middle East. The goal is singular: to stop the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from acquiring the most dangerous weapon on earth.

Many invoke Iraq as a cautionary tale. I was on the ground as an American soldier, sent on missions to find those exact weapons of mass destruction. They were not there. The United States invaded Iraq based on intelligence assessments that turned out to be catastrophically wrong. There were no active WMD programs, yet that claim became the justification for war. But the greatest failure came after Baghdad fell. The mission shifted from regime removal to vague, open-ended nation building, with no clear plan and no unified political strategy.

Then came one of the most damaging decisions in modern US history. The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the entire Iraqi military, sending hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers home without jobs, income, or direction. At the same time, a sweeping de-Ba’athification policy purged virtually every experienced civil servant from government, not for war crimes or corruption, but for their affiliation with a ruling party they had often joined just to survive professionally.

These moves collapsed Iraq’s governing institutions overnight and left a vacuum that was immediately filled by chaos, insurgency, and extremist groups. The failure was not in the use of force, but in what came after—a rushed deconstruction of a functioning state with no viable plan to rebuild it.

The intelligence in the lead-up to Iraq was thin, ambiguous, and in some cases outright fabricated. A single CIA source, later discredited, claimed Saddam Hussein had restarted biological weapons programs. The infamous claim that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Africa was based on forged documents. Analysts pointed to aluminum tubes as possible centrifuge components, even after the Department of Energy and other experts dismissed the theory.

Much of the intelligence was politicized, cherry-picked, and presented with far more confidence than it deserved. Conspiracy and historical revisionism have since claimed that the government intentionally lied. But it is far more likely that a combination of fear, urgency, and human error in the wake of September 11 led to a cascade of bad assumptions, institutional groupthink, and confirmation bias.

That is not the case with Iran. The IAEA has hard data, not vague suspicion. It has verified uranium enriched to 83.7 percent. It has documented missing stockpiles and hidden facilities. The only historical comparison is not Iraq in 2003, but Iraq in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor before Saddam could complete his program. The world later saw that act for what it was: a necessary preemptive strike that likely prevented a future disaster. The situation with Iran today is even more urgent….

It is important to realize that other presidents before Trump have used military force without prior congressional authorization, in Syria, in Libya, in Grenada. He was only following their precedent. His security officials had determined that Iran was within a week of being able to produce a single nuclear weapon, and he could not wait for the long process of obtaining, after heated and lengthy debate, congressional approval of an attack on Iran’s three most important nuclear sites.

Those who want to score political points against Trump accuse him of leading America into one more of those “forever wars,” like the eight-year war in Iraq and the twenty-year war in Afghanistan. Not at all. This was a single raid by American bombers (and Tomahawk missiles), lasting only twenty-five minutes. That raid does not constitute a “war.” No American boots were, or will be, on the ground. There are no plans to change the regime, though of course such a change would be welcomed in Washington. Those who are claiming that we are now on a slippery slope to a full-scale war with Iran that could last many years, and involve huge occupation forces, are simply trying to scare us into refraining from any more attacks, should Iran now “retaliate” for the June 21 raid. This is not something Trump is prepared to do. He has already warned Iran not to harm a single American soldier or civilian, or else face terrible consequences. But this, too, will not amount to the “forever war” we are being warned about.

AUTHOR

Hugh Fitzgerald

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