IRAN WARIraq War’s Aftermath Was a Disaster for the U.S. – the Iran War Is Headed in the Same Direction
The United States military achieved every objective it set when it went to war in Iraq in 2003. But the military outcome and the political outcome are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where wars fail.
The United States military achieved every objective it set when it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Decapitation: Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and hanged. Air dominance: total, within days. Regime collapse: The Iraqi government fell in 21 days.
Now, consider Iraq more than 20 years after the U.S.-Iraq war. Iraq is still an authoritarian state governed by political parties with deep institutional ties to Tehran. Iranian-backed militias operate openly on Iraqi soil – some holding official positions within the Iraqi state.
The country the U.S. spent US$2 trillion and 4,488 American lives to remake is, by any reasonable measure, within the sphere of Iran’s influence.
As an international security scholar specializing in nuclear security and alliance politics in the Middle East, I have tracked the pattern of U.S. military success across multiple cases.
But the military outcome and the political outcome are almost never the same thing, and the gap between them is where wars fail.
Two and a half millennia ago, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most confident in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming force and no coherent theory of governance for what came next.
The lesson, then and now, is not that empires cannot destroy. It’s that destruction and governance are entirely different enterprises. And confusing them is how empires exhaust themselves.
The U.S. military can destroy the Iranian regime. The question that the Iraq precedent answers – with brutal clarity – is what fills the power vacuum when it does?
The Military and Political Ledger
In April 2003, American L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which served as a transitional government, and issued two orders that would define the next two decades.
Order 1 dissolved the ruling Baath Party and removed all senior party members from their government positions, purging the administrative class that ran its ministries, hospitals and schools. Order 2 disbanded the Iraqi army but did not disarm it. Approximately 400,000 soldiers went home with their weapons and without their paychecks.
Washington had just handed the insurgency – the Sunni-led armed resistance that would turn into a decade-long war – its recruiting pool. The logic behind Bremer’s de-Baathification was intuitive: You cannot build a new Iraq with the people who built the old one. The logic was also catastrophic.
