BEWARE of the early consensus on a war. Remember that US interventions in Vietnam and Iraq remained popular for years (in America), until everybody claimed to have been against war all along.
By contrast, the US and Israeli war on Iran has been unpopular from the start, even in America (see sequential polls by Ipsos, Marist, SSRS, Washington Post, and Quinnipiac University).
Surely the retrospective unpopularity of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 helps to explain the pre-emptive unpopularity of the strikes on Iran in 2026. And surely war in general should be unpopular. Yet commentators are not mindful enough about how present justifiable prejudices against Iraq in 2003 might provoke unjustifiable misreadings of Iran 2026.
False analogies abound. Mohamed ElBaradei (former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency) said the current war ‘remind[s] me, unfortunately, of 2003 . . . It’s exactly the same. It’s based on . . . bogus evidence.’ Al Jazeera complains of the revival of the ‘2003 Iraq playbook’.
Hang on! Yes, the US and UK invented Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003 to justify their rush to war, but Iran is enriching uranium in defiance of its treaty obligations. In 2025, the IAEA reported that Iran boasts 440 kg of 60 per cent U-235, far above the level required for civilian energy production (about 5 per cent). US intelligence decided Iran was weeks away from further enriching enough material for at least one nuclear weapon. The 440 kg could be enriched for as many as ten nuclear weapons, not counting more than ten times as much weight in low enriched uranium.
Iran has been negotiating its way out of illegality for decades, without material punishment, except Israeli cyber-attacks (such as Stuxnet in 2010) and Israeli and US airstrikes (in 2025 and 2026).
Perhaps the US could have peacefully persuaded Iran to give up its enrichment. The US-Iran negotiations of February, mediated by Oman, made sufficient progress, according to Britain’s National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell.
But how credible a witness is Powell? This is a man who has repeatedly taken false credit for peace in Northern Ireland, who made the highly dogmatic claim that peace can always be negotiated, and who failed to achieve his expectations in his missions to China and the EU within the last year.
The US was probably right to conclude that Iran was just buying time and not serious about a negotiated peace.
If Iran won’t give up its illegal, unnecessary and suspicious enrichment of uranium, how on earth is the West supposed to stop Iran without kinetic action? Clearly Russia and Iran are not going to take responsibility since they illegally trade with Iran for energy and armaments. Western critics of US-Israeli military action offer no alternative to keep-on-talking.
A related criticism of war is that striking Iran just hardens the country’s resolve to develop nuclear weapons (to deter further attacks) and to seek revenge. The path to these outcomes seems to be proven by the theocrats’ selection of the late Supreme Leader’s son to replace him, and by Mojtaba Khamenei’s first subsequent statement (in the second week), when he alluded to terrorism in the homes of his enemies, promised to continue to bombard his neighbours and to close the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s embrace of more theocracy, terrorism, interference in commerce and disproportionate retaliation are arguments for a more invasive and punitive nuclear inspection regime, not arguments against intervention.
The Middle East Monitor complains of the US government drawing attention to its target’s ‘operational links with terrorists’ as it did in 2003, but Iran’s direct involvement in terrorism is well accepted. Even Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer admitted, while condemning the first US-Israeli strikes as illegal, that Iran ‘backed more than 20 potentially lethal attacks on UK soil’ last year alone.
When critics characterise war as illegal, they tend to characterise it as unnecessary too. For instance, Richard Haass (until recently president of the leftist Council on Foreign Relations) notes that the current war reminds him of George W Bush’s ‘preventive war of choice’ and lack of planning. Haass has written a book on the ‘war of choice’ without admitting his wisdom after the fact (he was the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning at the time).
In any case, a war of choice is not necessarily wrong. Wars are always choices. Sometimes leaders choose war as the alternative to a worse contingency, such as a nuclear-armed theocracy whose official policy is ‘death to America’.
Then there’s the quagmire analogy. Law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell says that ‘the United States began a war on Iran that will be compared with the disastrous March 2003 invasion of Iraq’ and ‘may turn out to be worse’.
But the Trump administration eschewed boots on the ground, except for agents in contact with Iranian dissidents. In 2003, the Bush administration and the Tony Blair administration chose to invade and to occupy, with myriad boots on the ground and tens of thousands of casualties.
Donald Trump is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
Air strikes alone are unlikely to provoke regime change or revolution, as the Brookings Institute rightly warned. And as War on the Rocks rightly points out, air strikes can degrade Iran’s capacity for enrichment, but cannot secure the uranium itself.
Most journalists use the unlikelihood of full regime change, revolution or securing the uranium as evidence for Trump’s over-optimism or lack of planning, instead of seeing his unwillingness to run different risks.
The Guardian claimed that the US and Israel had no justification and no objective in attacking Iran. Even the Spectator has published a claim of chaos and contradiction in the Trump administration’s planning. But the sources for both pieces are unusually few and remote. My sources admit Trump’s unpredictable decisiveness, but dispute the published criticisms as wide of the mark.
In fact a cursory reading of the public statements confirms that the US and Israel had planned and have mostly succeeded to knock back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, punish Iran’s bombardment of innocent third parties, destroy most of its nuclear facilities, ballistic missile launchers, warships, and air defences, and kill its supreme leader and close principals.
According to an Israeli report, 80 per cent of Iran’s capacity to strike Israel was eliminated before the end of the second week. This report is confirmed by simply counting strikes in open-source journalism: the frequencies of ballistic missile launches and drone launches each fell by more than 90 per cent by March 14.
Iran’s warships, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-layers have been destroyed at a similar rate. Its air defences are so weak that all kinds of aircraft are operating with impunity over Iran. Most importantly, the strikes have destroyed the superficial repairs and improvements to the nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow. US and Israeli forces are now striking the industrial facilities that would be needed to reconstitute enrichment and to produce more missiles.
Iran’s theocracy too is weakened by the loss of leaders to air strikes, in a country already rocked by popular protests (in January, the regime killed up to 33,000 of its own citizens).
Mojtaba Khamenei is not qualified religiously or professionally for the title of Supreme Leader irrespective of his lack of democratic mandate. His selection betrays ‘institutional fragility’. The deaths of the acting defence minister and intelligence chief suggest both political and military fragility.
There are risks to the campaign in spite of the effectiveness of US-Israeli strikes. More than 1,400 civilians have been killed in Iran. At least 13 US service members have been killed. Fanboys have undertaken terrorism in the American homeland. Energy prices have spiked.
Nevertheless, the risks of war do not justify false analogies, selective data or denials of the justifications and the successes.
