The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war.
In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: “We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?” Who indeed.
The Iranian side boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout
Once Saddam Hussein was in power, he poured resources into the nuclear site at Osirak in his race to be the first holder of an “Arab bomb.” He surrounded the nuclear site with anti-aircraft batteries and by 1981 was close to his dream. That was why, on June 7, 1981, the government of Menachem Begin in Israel deployed jets to destroy the reactor. The Israeli air force’s eight F-16s struck during a mealtime, when the anti-aircraft positions were unmanned. They hit their target and destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in under two minutes.
Naturally the international backlash was immediate. Foreign governments and press condemned the Israeli action as “unprovoked” and sneaky. The United Nations convened for a number of sessions to condemn the Israelis for depriving Saddam of his shiny nuclear reactor. Even the American government of the day condemned the Israelis. But there was a satisfying coda to the mission after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Had he had a nuclear weapon then, not only would the Iran-Iraq war of that decade have gone very differently, but it is highly unlikely that an international force would have dared to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. As the American defense secretary said to the Israelis with some understatement after the liberation of Kuwait, by taking out the Osirak reactor nine years earlier: “You made our job easier in Desert Storm.”
I mention this bit of history because there is a lot of chatter at the moment about America getting bogged down in Iran in the same way it got bogged down in Iraq after 2003. It is hard to overstate the extent to which parts of America are pushing this narrative, cynical as they remain about all foreign military interventions after Afghanistan and Iraq. There was a period where this sentiment dominated only on the American left. In Barack Obama’s time the Democrats were so worried about getting into a “boots on the ground” situation – to use the avoidable cliché – in Syria and elsewhere that they decided most of their problems could be solved by simply sending drones to kill their enemies.
With Trump’s rise to office, it was clear that a similar wariness had emerged on the American right. From the moment he started running for president, he realized that his own political side was equally tired of foreign interventions, especially ones that were lengthy, costly in every way and widely deemed to be a failure. It was Trump who broke the Republican respect for the interventionists – often in the most personal ways, as with his attacks on George W. Bush and John McCain.
Each time Trump ran for the presidency, a large part of his platform was that he would stop America getting involved in “stupid” wars in the Middle East. Just as Obama had upped America’s drone program, so Trump developed his own doctrine. The killing of the Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was perhaps the first time that Trump showed he could effectively take out an enemy of the United States and deter his opponent from any significant retaliatory strikes. Then earlier this year the US military on his orders carried out the daring raid on Caracas which brought the corrupt Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to face justice in New York. Trump’s critics complain that the success of that mission has led him to the hubris of Iran.
But if you listen to what the President, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and others have said since the start of this mission, the confusion is on the part of his listeners, not of the administration. From the beginning Trump has made a number of justifications for the action. But the one non-negotiable has been that Iran must not be allowed nuclear weapons. Given that the Iranian side actually boasted to the US negotiating team that they were weeks away from nuclear breakout, it isn’t hard to understand why the US chose this moment to strike. The fact that the Iranians learned from Osirak and spread out their nuclear sites is why this intervention has taken longer than two minutes.
Nevertheless there is chaff being thrown in the air from all sides. Yes at the start Trump suggested to the Iranian people that they rise up and overthrow the regime of the mullahs if they could. But the killing of tens of thousands of people by the religious militias in January has obviously had an effect. “Ha ha,” say Trump’s critics. “You see – you tried regime change and failed. Now you will have to – once again – ‘put boots on the ground’.” But the President is committed to doing no such thing.
Doubtless he would have liked to have seen the regime receive more opposition internally. But the hope that the Islamic Revolutionary government falls is the maximalist policy. The minimalist one is simply to ensure that for the foreseeable future Iran does not have any capacity to develop nuclear weapons.
I’m slightly surprised by some of the obfuscation and pretense of befuddlement that many national and international observers seem to be displaying in the face of this objective. ‘He hasn’t made it clear,’ they say again and again. But he has. The aim of Trump’s war in Iran is indeed to replay the Iraq intervention. But it is the intervention of 1981, not 2003.
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