The first Gulf war<\/p>\n
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<\/a> pushed the Iraqi leader\u2019s forces back with relative ease, maintaining a broad supportive Arab coalition, partly by ensuring Israel did not respond to Saddam\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n US 1st Cavalry Division troops deploy across the Saudi desert in November 1990 during preparations before the Gulf War. Photograph: Greg English\/AP<\/p>\n The onesidedness of that war has parallels with what is happening in Iran<\/a>. Azmi Bishara, the Arab intellectual, called the former a model of war that meant one side waging it without risk, the other without hope; \u201cone side accidentally losing a half dozen people, the other losing a few hundred thousand by force of arms\u201d.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ctake matters into their own hands\u201d, only to discover Bush would stand aside as they were crushed. It is a lesson the Kurds of Iran may have studied.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cin 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<\/a> and Iran\u201d.<\/p>\n Those bases, now under attack by Iran, became \u201cthe infrastructural foundation of American primacy\u201d.<\/p>\n The second Gulf war<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s authoritarian rule was ended.<\/p>\n double quotation markWe know from the last 40 years that failed states become centres for terrorism, smuggling, gun running, drugs and criminalityJohn Sawers, UK special representative in Baghdad in 2003<\/p>\n The optimism bias about the war\u2019s 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 \u201c23 million of the most educated people in the Arab world who are going to welcome us as liberators \u2026 The notion that we\u2019re going to earn more enemies by going in and getting rid of what every Arab knows is one of the worst tyrants \u2026 is just nonsense.\u201d Wolfowitz dismissed comparisons with the Balkans and said Iraq had no record of \u201cethnic militias fighting one another\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n US soldiers lead blindfolded and handcuffed men who were arrested in the Iraqi border town of Rawa, Anbar province, the heartland of Sunni insurgency, towards a US helicopter in November 2005. Photograph: Sean Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Another advocate for war was an Israeli opposition leader called Benjamin Netanyahu. He advised: \u201cIf 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.\u201d The opposite happened. Iran became stronger, including inside Iraq.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ctotal chaos\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cNo real planning had gone into the aftermath,\u201d he said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n US marines help Iraqi civilians pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Photograph: Sean Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He wrote: \u201cWhen implying the US can fix Middle Eastern problems if only it \u2018gets it right\u2019, 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\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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 \u201cserving as mobile production facilities for biological agents in Iraq\u201d. It later emerged this intelligence was wrong, but Powell believed it was necessary to make the case and garner global support for the invasion.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, while the Department of Defense simultaneously investigates whether the US was responsible for the bombing of a girls\u2019 primary school<\/a> in southern Iran which killed scores of children.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Families leaving Basra, Iraq, in 2004. Photograph: Dan Chung\/The GuardianThe present Gulf war<\/p>\n
![\"Pete](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/4092.jpg\")
Pete Hegseth claims Donald Trump is \u2018finishing\u2019 war with Iran \u2013 video<\/p>\n