Iran Is Not Iraq. But America Is Still America.

The easiest thing in the world is to recycle the 2003 playbook. Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Yellowcake. Curveball. The New York Times. "Mission Accomplished." It’s the ur-text for millennial political distrust, the archetype of hubris and elite failure. And so now, in 2025, the reflexive reaction to Trump bombing Iranian nuclear sites is predictable. Decry the lack of Congressional authorization. Invoke the Iraq disaster. Assume Netanyahu wrote the script and Trump read the cue cards. Declare this another imperial overreach, another chapter in the long decline.

But there’s a problem.

Iran might actually be what they always said Iraq was.

The centrifuges weren’t imaginary. The IAEA confirmed the presence of highly enriched uranium - far above levels consistent with civilian energy production. The nuclear facilities weren’t buried under hospitals or schools; they were under literal mountains. Natanz. Fordow. Arak. These were not Potemkin sites designed to spook Americans into overreach. They were real, heavily guarded, and remarkably consistent with a state aiming for breakout nuclear capacity.

This doesn’t mean war is wise. Or righteous. Or moral. Or defensible. But it does mean the usual script - the one that casts any military action as a repeat of Iraq - is too blunt for what’s actually happening.

There's a famous line from Tolstoy: "All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This principle applies to modern military interventions as well. Successful interventions tend to follow similar patterns - clear objectives, strong public support, adequate resources, and viable exit strategies. But failed interventions each fail in their own distinct ways, whether through mission creep, cultural misunderstanding, inadequate planning, or unforeseen political complications. Each military disaster teaches us something different about what can go wrong when nations attempt to solve problems through force.

The temptation to see every U.S. airstrike through the lens of Iraq is understandable, even logical. Iraq was a catastrophe, and catastrophes tend to reorder epistemology. It taught a generation to distrust power, to view intelligence claims as political tools, and to assume ulterior motives behind any invocation of national security.

And yet. Iran is not Iraq. There was no Ahmed Chalabi figure feeding dreams of liberation to credulous neocons. No PR blitz about mushroom clouds or smoking guns. There’s just a slow, grinding accumulation of facts over two decades: a regime that has funded militias from Beirut to Baghdad, crushed dissent at home with religious police and live ammunition, executed gay men and unveiled women, and pursued nuclear technology in the face of international sanctions and inspections.

They’re not pretending to be liberal democrats-in-waiting. They're not even pretending to be misunderstood. They chant "Death to America" without irony, fund Hezbollah without pretext, and back Hamas with cash and coordination. There’s a difference between propaganda and pattern recognition. This is the latter.

Let’s grant three things at once: (1) Trump is a dangerous narcissist, (2) Netanyahu is a cynical manipulator, and (3) Iran’s nuclear program is not benign.

These are not mutually exclusive. And treating them as such collapses discourse into nonsense.

Restraint in foreign policy is unequivocally preferable. The U.S. has burned trillions in the sands of the Middle East, achieving very little that outlived the deployments. And the human, the painfully human cost of conflict should break any non-sociopathic observer’s heart. But realism is not synonymous with inaction. A realist might look at Iran's nuclear breakout potential and decide that striking fortified facilities is better than allowing a fanatical theocracy to gain the bomb and trigger a regional arms race involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey.

The argument that "we can live with a nuclear Iran" rests on historical analogies to deterrence - "we survived the Soviet Union, we can survive this too." But that model relied on mutually assured destruction, communication hotlines, and at least some ideological constraints. Iran’s regime has a track record of supporting martyrdom, targeting diplomats, and conducting asymmetric warfare. They do not behave like the Soviet Union. They behave like a revolutionary state with millenarian goals and few constraints.

And they’re getting closer.

One of the oldest debates in nuclear politics is whether we should judge based on intent or capacity. Intent is unknowable. Regimes change. Factions rise. Leaders fall. Capacity is real. If you enrich uranium to 83.7%, you are within weeks of weapons-grade material. If you fortify sites deep inside mountains, you are preparing to survive a preemptive strike. If you obstruct inspectors, you're telling the world you have something to hide.

Iran has done all of this.

People forget that the JCPOA - Obama’s nuclear deal - was not premised on trust. It was premised on verification. Cameras, inspections, stockpile limits, export controls. And when Trump pulled out in 2018, Iran resumed enrichment, turned off the cameras, and accelerated its program. That wasn’t the response of a wronged party seeking diplomatic redress. That was a regime taking the leash off.

It’s not speculative. It’s observable.

Critics of the current bombing campaign have good reasons to worry. Trump is not a strategic thinker, he is a dangerous demagogue whose speeches sound like someone using ChatGPT prompts wrong. His administration is filled with B-tier yes-men and war-happy opportunists. Netanyahu has committed war crimes in Palestine, adding another layer of moral complexity to any joint military action. The timing of the strikes - just months before an election - raises eyebrows. And fundamentally, war itself is a horror that should give us all pause.

The risk is that anti-Trumpism becomes a kind of epistemic closure. If Trump bombs Iran, then Iran must not be a threat. If Trump says they’re building a bomb, then they must not be. If Netanyahu supports it, it must be part of a plot.

There are three scenarios to consider:

None of these outcomes are good. But pretending that the baseline - doing nothing - was safer is a kind of fantasy. Iran wasn’t freezing its enrichment. It wasn’t negotiating. It was building.

There is a psychological comfort in believing that all wars are lies. That all justifications are smokescreens. That every government is acting out of greed or self-interest. And sometimes that’s true. But not always.

The Allied firebombing of Dresden was a moral horror. But Nazi Germany was not a misunderstood regional actor. The Vietnam War was a disaster. But the Khmer Rouge, which rose in its aftermath, was not an advertisement for non-intervention.

The archive of history does not support a single moral lesson. It gives us contradictory truths. Intervention can save lives or destroy regimes. Restraint can preserve peace or invite catastrophe. There is no algorithm. Only judgment.

If you are absolutely sure that this bombing was wrong, ask what would have to be true for you to change your mind. How much enrichment? How many hidden facilities? How explicit a threat?

And if you are absolutely sure the bombing was right, ask whether you’d still believe that if Biden had ordered it. Or if it had occurred under Obama. Or if the intelligence later turns out to be incomplete.

War is not a morality play. It is not written in the language of heroes and villains. It is a deplorable bureaucratic process, a strategic wager, and a human disaster.

Iran may not be Iraq. But America, still, may be America.

And that’s what should worry you most.