The US-Israel war on Iran is a colossal blunder of world historical proportions. As clear an act of aggression as one can imagine, the war is blatantly illegal, continuing the death blow to international law and norms that began (most recently) with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
The war has also been launched with magnificently poor planning, as the United States seems shocked by and unprepared for how Iran uses every means at its disposal to restrict shipping in the strait of Hormuz. And with the massive disruption to the international supply of energy and certain necessary commodities, the global economy is teetering on collapse, with the United States and Israel mortgaging the futures of many poorer nations around the world – especially in Asia and Africa – for their own imperial adventurism.
Now, in what could be a sign of significant escalation after a month of this needless and immoral war, the Pentagon is poised to move thousands of ground troops into the region and readying itself for “weeks” of possible ground operations, according to reports.
Why is this happening again? Have we learned nothing from the past?
More than two decades ago, on 7 February 2003, the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told American troops in Europe that any invasion of Iraq would be brief. “It is not knowable how long that conflict would last,” Rumsfeld said. “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” With his signature aphoristic speaking style, Rumsfeld might have sounded like a poet to some, but it turns out he was a pretty lousy military planner.
That illegal US-led war began on 20 March 2003, and US combat troops remained in Iraq not for six months but for close to nine years. And that’s if we take official pronouncements at face value. Officially, American combat troops left the country in 2011, but US forces in other roles have remained in Iraq, including in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, since the 2003 invasion.
As we all now know, the US never discovered the feared “weapons of mass destruction” that ostensibly led to the war, nor was the US able to transform Iraq into a vassal state. That didn’t mean the war wasn’t enormously costly in terms of lives and expenditures. By 2006, the war had contributed to more than half a million Iraqi deaths, according to a cross sectional survey published in the esteemed medical journal the Lancet. US taxpayers had spent a staggering $1.92tn to support the war by 2020. Meanwhile, more than 4,500 American soldiers were killed. Iraqi society was decimated.
In his 2006 book Fiasco, the Washington Post’s senior Pentagon reporter Thomas Ricks wrote that the invasion of Iraq “was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign plan for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory.”
There may now be competition to Ricks’s damning assessment. When the US-led invasion of Iraq began, the US had assembled a force of 150,000 troops to invade Iraq. The UK contributed about 46,000 troops for the invasion, and other nations also contributed. The combined forces numbered almost 250,000 troops at the time of the invasion. And Iraq, it should be noted, is a much smaller country than Iran, both in terms of population and geography.
This time around, as the US is signaling that it may send ground troops into Iran, it has at its disposal a force of about 50,000 troops in the Middle East. This is only 10,000 more than are usually in the area. The mission objectives being talked about for these US troops – everything from occupying Iranian territory to locating and removing Iran’s stockpiled uranium to seizing control of key islands – seem to me, someone who admittedly is not a military strategist, to be, shall I say, aspirational.
This is not to say that I subscribe to any part of this war. It’s an insult to civilization. It’s also a continuation of the 2003 Iraq invasion. The US believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying a major Arab country would forever tilt the dynamics of the region toward Uncle Sam. That didn’t happen. Instead, Iraq’s old rival Iran emerged with much more clout and influence in the years since American boots hit the ground in Baghdad. If the thought now is that Iran must be demolished the way Iraq was demolished, one wonders who the next winner from the limited thinking of US politicians will be. Will it be Russia? Or China? Or both?
Meanwhile, Israel’s intentions in this war are increasingly clear. While American attention is focused almost exclusively on Iran, Israeli mobilization remains, once again, fixated on grabbing Lebanese territory. (Israel illegally occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.) “I have just instructed to further expand the existing security buffer zone,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video statement on 29 March. “We are determined to fundamentally change the situation in the north [of Israel].” Though Israel claims its actions are in self-defense against rocket fire coming from southern Lebanon, Israel violated its 2024 ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah approximately 10,000 times in its first year of implementation alone. For Israel, Iranian state collapse may be the icing on the cake. But the cake, it seems to me, is Lebanon.
The United States, on the other hand, appears more interested in a Venezuela-style takeover of Iran, and Trump may have fooled himself into thinking this was not only possible but easy. It’s turning out to be not so easy at all, and as the war drags on, and as more American soldiers potentially get caught up in the fight and killed, the popularity of this already unpopular war will plummet further. By introducing ground combat into a poorly planned war and with midterm elections around the corner, it may turn out that the only regime that is changed by this “excursion”, to borrow a euphemism from the American president, is his own.
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Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
