A defense secretary promises a war that won’t last more than a few weeks. A secretary of state insists on the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify a “preemptive” war. A president, in announcing the start of that war, vows to bring freedom to the people under ferocious American bombardment.
There are some clear differences between President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq — most of all, the Bush administration’s long run-up to the invasion, selling Americans on the fiction that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the United States (and, for good measure, that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda). By contrast, the Trump administration made virtually no public case for war and sought no congressional approval before Trump ordered the largest buildup of U.S. military forces in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq and then abruptly announced, in a video posted to social media at 2:30 a.m. Eastern time, that “major combat operations in Iran” were underway.
But in that video, Trump echoed — perhaps unwittingly — parts of Bush’s speech from the Oval Office on the night of March 19, 2003, when he declared the start of “military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Trump sounded an awful lot like a neocon from the early aughts, promising to deliver liberty to Iranians: “To the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.”
Trump’s initial insistence that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States was similarly Bush-like. “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” Bush warned in a now-infamous speech in October 2002. Trump and his administration have echoed that fearmongering, claiming that Iran was just weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, even though Trump had boasted about having “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in a bombing campaign less than a year ago.
There are uncanny similarities in the statements of Trump and Bush administration officials trying to spin and justify their respective wars of choice. Yet Trump officials are also trying to actively combat the perception that the two wars are at all similar, no doubt to avoid any association with a generational U.S. foreign policy failure that stained Bush and the GOP’s legacy so much that Trump successfully ran against the war in 2016 (even though he had, in fact, supported the invasion at the time).