Boys Go to Baghdad, Men Go to Tehran

Late in 2003 and early into my doctoral studies, I gathered with a group of fellow first-year students in our graduate lounge for a bull session on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. There, pressed together in a tiny repurposed office and with the Bush administration still mobilizing consent for America’s second go-around with Iraq, a very conservative and well-connected classmate shared with us what he was hearing from his friends inside the U.S. government. Speaking in a hushed voice as if to make us accomplices in conspiracy, he described how overthrowing Saddam Hussein was but the first step in a larger project to remake the entire region, with Iran its indispensable destination. “Boys go to Baghdad,” he intoned with quiet exuberance, “but men, men go to Tehran.”

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Dragged into the quagmire of insurgency in Iraq, the Bush regime never got around to war with Iran. It would take another two decades for my classmate’s fever dream to come true. On the final day of February this year, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint aerial campaign against Iran, immediately assassinating its head of state, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with members of his family. Another war of choice against a Muslim-majority country, and a final crusade to compensate for 47 years of “imminent war.”

Unlike Iraq in 2003, the current war commenced without the usual manufacturing of consent. It was enough that the U.S. government and its opposition deemed “the ayatollahs” to be an existential threat to America if not the entire world, constitutional niceties be damned. Trump, clearly intoxicated by the Venezuela adventure in January that removed President Nicolás Maduro from power, was eager to put on another show of what he called the “stunning, effective, and powerful” might of the U.S. military.

Operation Epic Fury was to be a quick “special military operation,” a term the administration borrowed from the Putin regime. Not unlike the Russian forces marching toward Kyiv in early 2022, the belief in Washington was that the job could be done quickly and with relatively little mess. The U.S. planned accordingly, which is to say hardly at all. Prepare the victory parade, skip the logistics. Real men go to Tehran, and it would only take three days to get there.

No Off-Ramps, No Destination

We’re now 16 days into combat operations and counting, with no end or theory of victory in sight. War makes for poor simulacra, and it is unlikely that the management of this one will be well served by the Trump administration’s taste for performative displays of alpha-male toughness. Early efforts by Israel and the U.S. to brand the campaign as a just and preventive war quickly disappeared under the debris of the campaign’s earliest targets, including a schoolhouse in Minab, Iran, where nearly 200 children died after a Tomahawk double-tap strike (in which rescuers are deliberately targeted after the first attack). The Trump regime is instead stumbling into calamity, and the rotating justifications proffered by the president and his minions for the conflict suggest that there is no exit strategy available (other than the one provided by Iran). Once again, America finds itself embroiled in an open-ended Middle East war, beginnings without endings.

The war, or “excursion,” as Trump described it on Wednesday, for now continues its tragic course. Though the conflict lacks a final destination, it is possible to identify how we got here, the on-ramps to devastation. The shorter and more immediate of these leads directly back to Trump’s willful violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) midway through his first term. U.S. exit from the nuclear deal in 2018 was less about a coherent geopolitical vision strategy than soothing Trump’s seething personal grievances against Iran and President Obama. During a March 3 Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Trump falsely claimed that the Obama-era deal “gave [Iran] the right to have top-of-the-line-nuclear weapons.” Even for Trump this was an outrageous lie, as international inspectors all confirmed the JCPOA did the exact opposite.

Unlike Iraq in 2003, the current war commenced without the usual manufacturing of consent.

This followed the president’s remarks a day earlier, in which he congratulated himself for saving the American public from that “horrible, horrible, dangerous document,” punctuating his heroics by deploying his predecessor’s full name: “I was very proud to have knocked out the Iran nuclear deal by President Barack Hussein Obama … [The Iranians] were on the road to getting [a nuclear weapon] legitimately, through a deal that was signed foolishly by our country.”

Trump’s abrogation of the nuclear deal fatally undermined the emerging coalition of conservative moderates and reformists led by President Hassan Rouhani that had been slowly normalizing, even secularizing, Iran’s political scene after the chaos of the years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was president from 2005 to 2013. The end of the JCPOA, predictably, strengthened the hand of Rouhani’s hard-line rivals, anti-democratic forces who happen to agree with Trump that the deal signed by Iran and the P5+1 in Vienna was “the worst deal ever,” and for whom foreign conflict presents a welcome opportunity to renew the country’s flagging revolutionary spirit.

For the Iranians, the JCPOA was also principally about domestic politics, the treaty a mechanism for conciliating factional and elite rivalries at home through foreign policy. By taking regime change off the board and normalizing relations with Europe and possibly the United States, Iran’s elected government, in alliance with the Office of the Supreme Leader, hoped to cut off the return of the populist and ardently anti-American hard line that had proven so catastrophic for the regime’s prospects during the tenure of the erratic Ahmadinejad.

Supreme Leader Khamenei, as the final (but not only) authority in the Iranian political system, played both ends of the debate, as was his usual practice, with one foot in both the pro- and anti-JCPOA camps. A savvy political operator, he distrusted Americans and remained wary of any agreement with the U.S., yet nonetheless took a public stance of “heroic flexibility,” a position of forced pragmatism in the face of overwhelming U.S. power in the context of a deeply rooted imperative to preserve Iran and its revolutionary system at any cost. Khamenei sanctioned ongoing negotiations with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear portfolio, dispatching his lead negotiators in early July 2012 to meet with their American counterparts in Oman, almost a full year before Rouhani’s election. These efforts at diplomacy continued right up until the start of the war, until Israeli and U.S. bombs confirmed his suspicion of Americans.

Wars Without Consequences

The second on-ramp to war followed a more entrenched and expansive route, an entry point shaped by the political culture of the U.S.. America never came to terms with what it did in Iraq, or how it got itself there in the first place. Apart from a truly egregious bombing or murder in Baghdad or Mosul, by the end of Bush’s final term and well into Obama’s first, most Americans hardly noticed that U.S. forces were still fighting and dying there.

The wrong people paid the price as a consequence. Though the proverbial “boys” in the neocon’s slogan didn’t go to Baghdad, plenty of real men and women did go to Iraq, good Americans sent to fight in a bad war. Of the 2.5 million Americans who served over the eight years of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 4,508 were killed, and more than 32,000 returned home wounded, to say nothing of the multitudes doomed with PTSD (the approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed during the invasion and occupation constitute an afterthought, if that). The ripple effects continue to today, and include the rise of ISIS, greatly worsening the Syrian civil war and associated refugee crisis in Europe, and much more.

None of the politicians and think-tank warriors behind the Iraq War fiasco ever had to answer for their actions, the costs of battle borne by others. Bush remains retired and on pension, comfortably ensconced in a Dallas suburb and kept busy by portrait therapy. His vice president and the chief architect of the Iraq War lived out his remaining days as a sought-after foreign-policy consultant, and for his final act, a vocal advocate for Kamala Harris, with whom he shared the belief that Iran represented America’s “greatest adversary.” Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad became for a time a ski instructor in Vermont. Now 84, he lives in Washington and, like the president he worked under, he is a keen painter. My plugged-in classmate from two wars ago is today a tenured professor at a prominent liberal arts school on the East Coast.

As for the voting public, the greatest U.S. domestic failure in a generation was to allow the same collection of ideologues and opportunists who cheered the country into folly in 2003 to come back into power in 2024 and do the same in Iran. Impunity and apathy paved the way for today.

What the Possibility of War Is Like for an Iranian-American

Iran happened because America as a whole learned little from Iraq, and therefore did not fundamentally change its approach to foreign policy in the Middle East, certainly not toward Iran. Trump’s Iran war, by contrast, is already having major effects on America, and not in desirable or expected ways. Although only two weeks old, the rapidly expanding conflict has already had material, perhaps irreversible, geopolitical effects on U.S. relations with its allies in the region. Iranian strikes against Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have set into motion a cascade of bitter recriminations by member nations against the Trump administration, driven by the growing perception that the presence of American bases in their countries has made them less safe. Worse, the U.S. is bad for business.

The reputational damage to America’s global leadership, already diminished by Trump’s erratic behavior in his second term, will not be easily repaired, if at all. If the British famously inherited their empire in a fit of absent-mindedness, Trump seems destined to lose America’s through sheer obliviousness and incompetence. Americans so far seem not to notice the ground shifting beneath their feet, oblivious to the course of things even as they cast anxious eyes to their telephone screens and stock portfolios. The correspondent and former Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor recently checked in from his travels in India to warn that “Americans have barely scratched the surface in understanding how the rest of the world is reacting to this war,” that it is “well on its way to becoming an Iraq War-style disaster in the global imagination.”

Foreign policy emerges from the character and quality of a country’s domestic politics. The vote for president in 2024 was a test of that character and of basic judgment, even more than in 2016. Americans failed that test. Now the bill comes due again, and again it will be paid in full by generations still to come. The undeserving carry the costs of folly: the weeping family of a 20-year-old Army sergeant from Iowa, who died isolated in a Kuwaiti industrial port area miles away from his Army base; a young Iranian boy waving goodbye to his mother on his way to school, on the last day of his life—these are just the first of many victims, new lives destroyed by the carelessness of old men far away.