In 2002, President George W Bush started pushing for military action against Iraq, which the Central Intelligence Agency had told him was building and holding ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ WMD, in violation of United Nations’ sanctions after President Saddam Hussein al Tikriti had sent his Republican Guard to conquer and annex bordering Kuwait. President Hussein’s forces openly used chemical weapons against Kurds in Iraq and in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. After the United States led coalition kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq was forced to dismantle its WMD programs and stockpiles, but it wasn’t difficult to believe reports that the country was building them again.
The younger President Bush got the authorization he needed from Congress, and sent in the troops to invade Iraq, quickly overrunning the country and chasing Mr Hussein out of power, but the WMD we went in to seize were never found. A lot of Democrats accused Mr Bush of having made up the whole thing, simply to finish off what his father had left undone in 1991, even though former double-nought spy Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in her book, Fair Game, that not finding the purported WMD surprised the CIA. Mrs Wilson hated Mr Bush, and certainly no reason to defend him, but, of course, the American left were not going to mention that part of her book.
Fast-forward to Juneteenth, and The Wall Street Journal:
Most Republicans support Israel and don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
By The Editorial Board | Thursday, Juneteenth 2025 | 6:12 PM EDT
The press is full of reporting on the “MAGA civil war” over Iran, but what’s notable is that the loudest isolationists appear to be losing the debate. It’s worth considering how they’ve misread the historical moment, the views of most Republicans, and above all President Trump.
Start with the threat and the mission. Like leftists after Vietnam, the new-right isolationists see every U.S. military intervention as a slippery slope to disaster. Instead of Vietnam Syndrome, they suffer from Iraq Syndrome: Every U.S. intervention will turn into a quagmire of “nation-building,” or even catastrophe.
Well, it’s certainly true that Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, did turn into a “quagmire of ‘nation-building’,” a failed quagmire of nation-building. Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Talban, while Iraq, though nominally a democracy, is wracked with corruption and is considered by some to be yet another authoritarian state. 4,492 Americans were killed in Iraq, and for what? Of the 22,700 American servicemen who were wounded but not killed, 1,650 are amputees of one form or another. Was it worth it?
While I’m one of the few who actually read Mrs Wilson’s book, whether people believed that President Bush deliberately lied or that the intelligence was simply faulty, we all know one thing: the United States went into the second Persian Gulf War based on intelligence reports which did not turn out to be accurate.
That more aggressive American action against Iran was pushed by former Vice President Mike Pence — it was his tweet I used to illustrate this article — can only serve to make conservatives more leery of the idea!
Wars are unpredictable and always come with risks that must be contemplated. But so far Israel is winning this fight without regional, much less global, escalation. Iran has fired back at Israel, with decreasing missiles by the day, while Russia and China steer clear. “Military conflict is not a solution,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday.
The isolationists are unwilling to make distinctions and treat each intervention on its own terms. In Iran’s case, no one is talking about putting U.S. troops on the ground or a military occupation. Nor is anyone asking the U.S. to do the heavy lifting or take the biggest risk. “This is the dirty work that Israel does for all of us,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Tuesday.
Israel’s war against Iran is not a pre-emptive strike, because Iran has been supplying money and weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis all along, encouraging them to use them against Israel, and those terrorist groups have used Iranian supplied weapons to attack the Jewish state. But Israel has been striking targets against sites that Mossad, their intelligence agency, have said are developing and attempting to build nuclear weapons. Mossad may well be right about that — they are the best intelligence agency in the world — but Israel is doing the same thing the younger President Bush did in 2002 and 2003: encouraging military action against a foreign nation based upon intelligence assessments, intelligence assessments which could be wrong.
They were, after all, wrong in 2002!
Another difference with Iraq is that Iran actually has an advanced nuclear program, far beyond any civilian purpose. There’s no uncertainty on this point, as the International Atomic Energy Agency has documented. The only debate is whether Iran, on the precipice of a nuclear breakout, was already weaponizing or merely threatening to do so at a time of its choosing. But does anyone now think Iran would hold off, if it is left with its enrichment at Fordow intact?
And there we have it: the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal have just said that it really doesn’t matter whether the intelligence assessments are right, but that because they could be right, we must bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!
Is it really any surprise, after the intelligence failures over Iraq, that some people who thoroughly support Israel are nevertheless leery of attacking Iran based on intelligence estimates from the agency of a foreign nation which has a vested interest in getting the United States to join in the attack on Iran?
