From Bush Sr to Trump: the risks, lessons and legacy of US interference in the Middle East
This is the third Gulf war and umpteenth outbreak of conflict since the United States took over as the dominant power and influence in the Middle East at the end of the cold war. And it is arguably the most dangerous, consequential and confused of them all. The destruction and chaos spreading across the region confirms the Middle East’s status as the world’s pre-eminent crisis factory, but it also raises questions as to how US presidents so often declare they are ending US interference in the region, only to be lured back in. Since the second world war the US has set out to oust a government in the Middle East on average once a decade, and on almost every occasion it has left the country, and the US, worse off as unexpected consequences eventually emerge. As Donald Trump embarks on yet another regime change – this time in Iran, a country of 90 million people – the sense of foreboding is profound. Already the timelines are extending, and the sense is growing by the day that Trump is gambling with the fate of a country about which he knows next to nothing. The first Gulf war The first Gulf war, in 1990-91, at least had the advantage of being of a containable scope, purpose and duration. Once Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in a warped blow for pan-Arabism, George HW Bush pushed the Iraqi leader’s forces back with relative ease, maintaining a broad supportive Arab coalition, partly by ensuring Israel did not respond to Saddam’s provocations to become involved. Famously respecting the UN security council mandate to liberate Kuwait, but not invade Iraq, Bush decided not to pursue the routed Iraqi army to Baghdad. The ground campaign took only 100 hours.
The onesidedness of that war has parallels with what is happening in Iran. Azmi Bishara, the Arab intellectual, called the former a model of war that meant one side waging it without risk, the other without hope; “one side accidentally losing a half dozen people, the other losing a few hundred thousand by force of arms”. But the war did leave a legacy. Kurds and Shia Muslims learnt the risk of being used by a US president, having been encouraged to rise up against Saddam and “take matters into their own hands”, only to discover Bush would stand aside as they were crushed. It is a lesson the Kurds of Iran may have studied. Secondly, the war brought half a million US troops to the Middle East and, as Marc Lynch writes in his book The Ruination of a Region, those troops “in a symbolic sense, never went home, instead moving out 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”. Those bases, now under attack by Iran, became “the infrastructural foundation of American primacy”. The second Gulf war In the second Gulf war, known as the Iraq war, from 2003-11, George W Bush determined Saddam must go because of his presumed possession of weapons of mass destruction. It meant the US at least possessed an identifiable war aim, albeit one based on a gargantuan intelligence failure for which no one took the blame. Whether Washington went to war on a lie or a misapprehension, it went in not knowing enough about the country it was invading or the forces it would uncork once Saddam’s authoritarian rule was ended.
The optimism bias about the war’s aftermath was so deep because the desire to go to war was so deep. In Congressional testimony, the then deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, told members of the house armed services committee in February 2003 that the Iraqis were “23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world who are going to welcome us as liberators … The notion that we’re going to earn more enemies by going in and getting rid of what every Arab knows is one of the worst tyrants … is just nonsense.” Wolfowitz dismissed comparisons with the Balkans and said Iraq had no record of “ethnic militias fighting one another”, so large postwar peacekeeping forces would not be required. He was also confident free Iraqis would reject Islamist extremism or theocratic rule. He admitted he based his arguments in part on his personal contacts.
Another advocate for war was an Israeli opposition leader called Benjamin Netanyahu. He advised: “If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations across the region. And I think the people sitting right next door in Iran, young people and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone.” The opposite happened. Iran became stronger, including inside Iraq. More recently, John Sawers, the former head of MI6 and the UK special representative in Baghdad in 2003, described the aftermath of the invasion as “total chaos”. “No real planning had gone into the aftermath,” he said. “The Americans were sitting hunkered down in their tanks and armoured vehicles with reflective sunglasses and heavy helmets on with no engagement with the Iraqi people at all. They just assumed that once American forces had toppled Saddam then the Iraqi exiles would come in, take over and everything would be hunky-dory. Well, it turned out to be completely different from that.”
Philip Gordon, who was a national security adviser to the former US vice-president Kamala Harris, argued in 2015 that there was something fundamentally wrong about the US concept of regime change. He wrote: “When implying the US can fix Middle Eastern problems if only it ‘gets it right’, it is worth considering that in Iraq the US intervened and occupied and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya the US intervened and did not occupy and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria the US neither intervened nor occupied and the result was a costly disaster”. Indeed, he wrote a whole book citing examples of how the US fails to anticipate the chaos that inevitably ensues after regime collapse. War can end a regime, but not install a cohesive society. Yet the striking aspect of the pre-Iraq war debate was the extent to which there was one. By comparison, in the run-up to the attack on Iran the Trump administration has prized deceit and surprise. In February 2003, the US defense secretary, Colin Powell, thought it necessary to go to the UN to make an hour-long multimedia presentation showing trucks and train carriages allegedly “serving as mobile production facilities for biological agents in Iraq”. It later emerged this intelligence was wrong, but Powell believed it was necessary to make the case and garner global support for the invasion.
Now, by contrast, the halls of the UN security council are silent, or filled with Melania Trump lecturing the world on the rights of the child in wartime, while the Department of Defense simultaneously investigates whether the US was responsible for the bombing of a girls’ primary school in southern Iran which killed scores of children. In 2002, many Department of State officials warned of the likely cost, and the length of the occupation, and of the possibility that the beneficiary would be Iran and the Shias inside Iraq. They were right. The estimates vary, but the war probably cost the US $2tn, spawned the Islamic State terrorist organisation and led to the deaths of 150,000 to 1 million people, according to different estimates. Tony Blair’s insistence that the invasion should be accompanied by a new push on the Palestinian question bore no fruit, leaving the issue to be sidelined until 2023.
The present Gulf war Fast forward to Trump’s Operation Epic Fury and, compared with 2002, all we have is epic confusion. In a succession of interviews, statements and phone calls, Trump and his team have offered wildly contradictory justifications for the war. Little of it extends beyond assertion. Rotating rationales have been set out in Top Gun-style seminars delivered by the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who uses the title “secretary of war”. “Crazy regimes like Iran, hell bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons,” he said.
Iran was close to having an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit America, ran one administration claim. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-purpose international envoy, said Iran was one week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material. The vice-president, JD Vance, said the nuclear talks with Iran had not passed the smell test, arguing Iran was building facilities 20 metres (70ft) underground and enriching uranium to 60% purity. As a result, the nuclear sites that were “obliterated” in the attacks last June needed re-obliterating. Trump himself has described the terrorist nature of the regime stretching back 40 years, and spoken of regime change. But it was the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who presented the most startling rationale. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” he told reporters. “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.”
It seems no one in the White House thought an alternative solution to this risk might be to tell Israel not to attack Iran. Yet again, people ask: “Who is the fucking superpower around here?” – the question raised by Bill Clinton in 1996 after a bruising first encounter with Netanyahu. Some of the mess may be because the Israeli and US political objectives are not fully aligned. The fear of the Iraq quagmire leads Trump to say he is looking for an elusive Iranian equivalent of the person who replaced Nicolás Maduro as leader in Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, a figure who, while rooted in the regime, could pivot policy pragmatically to Washington’s expectations. It is similar to the intention of the then secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, that “the army would be defeated, but the institutions would hold” in Iraq. Trump said this week he had found some likely candidates, but then admitted that unfortunately they were now lying dead in the rubble of a bombed government building. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. Now, we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty sure we’re not going to know anybody.”
At times, however, Trump does not sound like a man who only wants to “blow off the bloody doors” in Iran; he wants to engineer the building’s complete collapse, and is willing to open Pandora’s box by asking Iranian Kurdish rebels to help make this happen. Sawers, drawing on his experiences across the Middle East, 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. If the country dissolves into component parts it will be basically a failed state. We know from the last 40 years they become a centre for terrorism, smuggling, gun running, drugs and criminality of all sorts.” Iran’s sizeable ethnic minorities – Kurds, Balochs, Ahwazi Arabs, Azerbaijanis – forcing Iran to disintegrate has always been one of the leadership’s greatest fears, and their complaint of exploitation has been longstanding. The vast majority of Iran’s natural resources – 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 central plateau, an arid region bounded to the west by the Zagros mountains, to the north by the Alborz range, and to the east by Iran’s central desert. The parallels between the Gulf wars are not perfect. Israel was not the driving force that it is in this conflict, and the likelihood of a Sunni-Shia split is smaller. No western ground troops are involved. But the danger is that this has been a US project rigidly focused on the destruction of the threat posed by Iran. The harbingers of shock and awe know little about the forces that could emerge from the Islamic republic’s destruction. On the way to Baghdad in 2003 the commander of the US forces, Gen David Petraeus asked a famous question: “Tell me how this ends?” It remains as pertinent now as it did then.
