From Bush Sr to Trump: The Risks, Lessons and Legacy of US Interference in the Middle East
While there are undeniable similarities with previous wars against Iraq, the current conflict with Iran may prove to be the most dangerous and consequential yet. This represents the third Gulf war and the umpteenth outbreak of conflict since the United States established itself as the dominant power and influence in the Middle East following the Cold War. Many analysts argue this current confrontation is the most perilous, significant, and confused of them all.
The Cycle of Intervention and Its Consequences
The destruction and chaos spreading across the region confirms the Middle East's status as the world's pre-eminent crisis factory. However, it also raises serious questions about how US presidents repeatedly declare they are ending American interference in the region, only to be inevitably lured back into military engagements. Since the Second World War, the United States has attempted to oust a government in the Middle East approximately once every decade. On almost every occasion, these interventions have left both the targeted country and the United States worse off as unexpected consequences eventually emerge.
As Donald Trump embarked on yet another regime change operation—this time targeting Iran, a nation of ninety million people—the sense of foreboding among foreign policy experts was profound. Already, military timelines are extending, and the growing perception is that Trump is gambling with the fate of a country about which he possesses minimal understanding.
The First Gulf War: A Contained Conflict with Lasting Impact
The first Gulf War in 1990-91 at least had the advantage of being relatively contained in scope, purpose, and duration. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in a misguided attempt at pan-Arabism, President George H.W. Bush successfully pushed Iraqi forces back with relative ease. He maintained a broad supportive Arab coalition partly by ensuring Israel did not respond to Saddam's provocations. Famously respecting the UN Security Council mandate to liberate Kuwait but not invade Iraq, Bush decided against pursuing the routed Iraqi army to Baghdad. The ground campaign lasted only one hundred hours.
The one-sided nature of that conflict has parallels with current events in Iran. Arab intellectual Azmi Bishara described the first Gulf War as a model where one side waged war without risk while the other fought without hope. However, the war left a significant legacy. Kurds and Shia Muslims learned the risk of being used by a US president after being encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein, only to discover Bush would stand aside as they were brutally crushed. This historical lesson has likely been studied by Kurds in Iran today.
Furthermore, the conflict brought half a million US troops to the Middle East. As Marc Lynch writes in his book The Ruination of a Region, those troops "in a symbolic sense, never went home." Instead, they dispersed into an archipelago of US bases across the Gulf, the Levant, and southern Turkey designed to implement the dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. These bases, now under attack by Iranian forces, became "the infrastructural foundation of American primacy" in the region.
The Second Gulf War: Intelligence Failures and Unforeseen Chaos
During the second Gulf War from 2003-2011, President George W. Bush determined Saddam Hussein must be removed due to presumed possession of weapons of mass destruction. This provided the United States with an identifiable war aim, albeit one based on a gargantuan intelligence failure for which no one accepted blame. Whether Washington went to war based on deliberate deception or genuine misapprehension, American forces entered Iraq without sufficient understanding of the country they were invading or the forces they would unleash once Saddam's authoritarian rule ended.
The optimism bias about the war's aftermath was profound because the desire to go to war was so deeply entrenched. In Congressional testimony, then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told members of the House Armed Services Committee in February 2003 that Iraqis were "twenty-three million of the most educated people in the Arab world who are going to welcome us as liberators." He dismissed concerns about creating more enemies and rejected comparisons with the Balkans, insisting Iraq had no record of "ethnic militias fighting one another" and that large postwar peacekeeping forces would not be required.
Another advocate for war was Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who advised: "If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations across the region." The opposite occurred—Iran became significantly stronger, including within Iraq itself. More recently, John Sawers, former head of MI6 and UK special representative in Baghdad in 2003, described the invasion aftermath as "total chaos" with no real planning for what would follow Saddam's removal.
The Current Gulf War: Epic Confusion and Contradictory Justifications
Fast forward to Trump's Operation Epic Fury, and compared with 2002, the situation is characterized by epic confusion. In a succession of interviews, statements, and phone calls, Trump and his administration have offered wildly contradictory justifications for the war against Iran. Rotating rationales have been presented in Top Gun-style seminars delivered by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who uses the title "Secretary of War." Administration claims have ranged from Iran being close to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to being one week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio presented perhaps the most startling rationale, explaining: "We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties." Remarkably, no one in the White House appears to have considered the alternative solution of telling Israel not to attack Iran.
Some of the current mess may stem from misaligned political objectives between Israel and the United States. The fear of another Iraq-style quagmire has led Trump to search for an elusive Iranian equivalent of Venezuela's Delcy Rodríguez—a figure rooted in the regime who could pivot policy pragmatically toward Washington's expectations. This approach mirrors former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's intention that "the army would be defeated, but the institutions would hold" in Iraq.
The Danger of Unforeseen Consequences
John Sawers has warned of "the dangerous possibility that the regime could corrode or collapse and lose control of parts of the country, and then the country could fragment into several different parts where you have local administrations crop up, often on an ethnic basis." Iran's sizeable ethnic minorities—Kurds, Balochs, Ahwazi Arabs, and Azerbaijanis—have long complained of exploitation, and the potential disintegration of Iran along ethnic lines has always been one of the leadership's greatest fears.
The vast majority of Iran's natural resources—including oil, gas, and major water sources—are found outside the central plateau in areas with non-Persian communities and a sizeable Sunni Muslim population. By contrast, the Shia-Persian majority is concentrated on the arid central plateau. While parallels between the Gulf wars are not perfect—Israel was not the driving force in previous conflicts as it is now, and the likelihood of a Sunni-Shia split is smaller—the danger remains that this has been a US project rigidly focused on destroying the threat posed by Iran without sufficient understanding of what forces might emerge from the Islamic Republic's destruction.
On the way to Baghdad in 2003, General David Petraeus asked the famous question: "Tell me how this ends?" That question remains as pertinent today as it was then, highlighting the enduring pattern of American intervention in the Middle East producing unintended and often catastrophic consequences that reverberate for decades.
