A defense secretary promises a war that won’t last more than a few weeks. A secretary of state insists on the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify a “preemptive” war. A president, in announcing the start of that war, vows to bring freedom to the people under ferocious American bombardment.
There are some clear differences between President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq — most of all, the Bush administration’s long run-up to the invasion, selling Americans on the fiction that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the United States (and, for good measure, that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda). By contrast, the Trump administration made virtually no public case for war and sought no congressional approval before Trump ordered the largest buildup of U.S. military forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq and then abruptly announced, in a video posted to social media at 2:30 a.m. Eastern time, that “major combat operations in Iran” were underway.
But in that video, Trump echoed — perhaps unwittingly — parts of Bush’s speech from the Oval Office on the night of March 19, 2003, when he declared the start of “military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Trump sounded an awful lot like a neocon from the early aughts, promising to deliver liberty to Iranians: “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.”
Trump’s initial insistence that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States was similarly Bush-like. “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush warned in a now-infamous speech in October 2002. Trump and his administration have echoed that fearmongering, claiming that Iran was just weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, even though Trump had boasted about having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in a bombing campaign less than a year ago.
There are uncanny similarities in the statements of Trump and Bush administration officials trying to spin and justify their respective wars of choice. Yet Trump officials are also trying to actively combat the perception that the two wars are at all similar, no doubt to avoid any association with a generational U.S. foreign policy failure that stained Bush and the GOP’s legacy so much that Trump successfully ran against the war in 2016 (even though he had, in fact, supported the invasion at the time).
Take Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host now running the self-declared Department of War, who has insisted, “This is not Iraq … no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise.” But he has sounded at times like Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, whose pronouncements now read like a catalog of imperial delusions that doomed U.S. strategy in Iraq.
In an interview in November 2002, when the Bush administration was deep into making the case for invading Iraq, Rumsfeld confidently predicted a short war. “The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground,” he said. “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
Hegseth parroted that pronouncement in a press briefing on March 4, boasting that while there was no predetermined timeline for the war, it would only last a matter of weeks. “You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo.”
Hegseth has backtracked on the war’s timeline, saying it was not for him “to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle or the end.” That was up to Trump, who has recently contradicted himself several times — in some cases, in just a matter of hours — about when the war might end.
But Hegseth has also chided the media for its reporting on the war — again channeling Rumsfeld, who often blamed American reporters for what he called their “unhelpful” coverage of Iraq, accusing them of only focusing on the “negatives” of the war and even publishing “misinformation.” “This is what the fake news misses,” Hegseth complained to reporters. “We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground. We control their fate. But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.”
“Tragic things happen” was Hegseth’s way of referring to the first American deaths in this war — the six American troops killed in Kuwait when an Iranian drone struck their makeshift operations center, which was housed in a trailer vulnerable to aerial attack. There were no warnings or sirens to evacuate into a bunker before the drone’s direct hit on the trailer, just after 9 a.m. local time. Hegseth had previously — and inaccurately — described the trailer as a “fortified” tactical operations center, while he and the administration have soft-pedaled the severity of the attack and other Iranian retaliation on U.S. military bases and installations across the Gulf.
The Kuwait attack was, in fact, much worse than the Pentagon initially indicated. Dozens of soldiers were injured — “including brain trauma, shrapnel wounds and burns,” CBS News reported this week — in an attack that U.S. Central Command, on March 1, claimed had killed three service members (not six) and seriously wounded five, with “several others” sustaining only “minor shrapnel injuries and concussions.”
“Tragic things happen” sounded a lot like “Stuff happens,” Rumsfeld’s notorious minimization of the rampant looting of Baghdad in April 2003, when the fall of the Iraqi capital to American troops brought havoc, not liberation. Rumsfeld’s downplaying of the chaos that presaged the disastrous U.S. occupation to come — “It’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy” — would haunt him and Bush as the war dragged on. So far in this war, what Hegseth dismissed as “a few drones get through or tragic things happen” has included damage to at least 17 U.S. sites in the region, including military bases and embassies, “several of which have been struck more than once since the war began,” according to The New York Times, which cited U.S. military officials who say that “the intensity of the retaliatory strikes has signaled that Iran was more prepared for the war than many in the Trump administration had anticipated.”
“A few drones get through” also downplayed the barrages of Iranian missiles and drones that continue to strike Gulf states, from cities like Dubai and Manama to key energy infrastructure, puncturing the Gulf’s image as an island of stability under U.S. military protection.
Meanwhile, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Trump’s former national security adviser, responded to a question about reports that Trump has considered sending ground troops into Iran with language that sounded straight out of the Bush administration. “We have troops and assets that are focused on seizing weapons of mass destruction, if needed and if so ordered,” Waltz said.
With its contradictory, muddled rationales, no one in the Trump administration, or among Republicans in Congress, can settle on any single, coherent message about why this war was launched in the first place, or even whether it is a war, which would require Congress’s approval under the Constitution. That stands in marked contrast to Bush’s ideological mantra for war — which the entire administration stuck to stubbornly for years — about Saddam’s WMDs and the illusion of turning Iraq into a democracy under American occupiers who would be “greeted as liberators,” even as the country quickly fell apart.
The Trump administration mimicking the Bush administration — with a war against Iran that “generations of neocons have fantasized about,” as David Klion wrote recently for Equator — shows that neoconservatism is not as discredited or marginalized in Washington as the conventional wisdom suggests. Or at the very least, Klion argues, it reveals that a divergent trajectory of neoconservatism — “all in on populism, unilateralism, military adventurism and the blatant prioritization of Israeli interests” — has found a home in Trump’s White House in Hegseth and Marco Rubio, who has metamorphosed from a traditional Republican neocon into this more MAGA incarnation. Many of the “Never Trumpers” who championed the Iraq War, from Bill Kristol to David Frum, remain firmly outside the gates.
In perhaps the most revealing echo of all, the Trump administration said that the Iranian regime would crumble or surrender under U.S. and Israeli bombardment, evoking the Bush fantasy of “shock and awe” — of bombing Iraq into submission in a few short weeks in 2003. Hegseth even boasted in that March 4 briefing to reporters that “Operation Epic Fury” had “delivered twice the air power of ‘shock and awe’ of Iraq in 2003, minus Paul Bremer and the nation-building.”
The illusions of “shock and awe” culminated in Bush’s ignominious “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003, when he triumphantly declared from the deck of an aircraft carrier that “major combat operations in Iraq” had ended — in a war that would then consume the rest of his presidency. The setting was different, but at a political rally this week in Kentucky, Trump had his own “mission accomplished” message for his supporters about the war in Iran: “We won. We won,” Trump crowed. “In the first hour it was over, but we won.”
As Elizabeth N. Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia University who studies U.S. military interventions, has observed, the Trump team’s predictions of an easy victory in Iran mirror the Bush administration’s early claims about Iraq. A quick, decisive war was “what Iraq 2003 was supposed to be,” Saunders, author of the 2024 book “The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace,” noted in a social media post. The “light footprint” of American troops that Rumsfeld embraced for occupying Iraq, based on predictions of a “cakewalk” by neoconservative boosters, reflected the Bush administration’s magical thinking about the war it had unleashed. The Trump administration now seems possessed by the same hubris over Iran.
But like Bush, Trump will soon find out — if he hasn’t already, given the shock to energy markets with tanker traffic effectively halted through the vital Strait of Hormuz — that starting a war in the Middle East is the easy part. And like the Bush administration, the Trump administration will not be able to control the “pace and tempo” of this war, or its unintended consequences, as it wreaks havoc across the Middle East and risks a doomsday scenario for the region’s oil and gas exports, which fuel the global economy. Most of all, Trump will not be able to control how this war ends.
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