Stop interpreting Iran 2026 as Iraq 2003
Why Iran 2026 is not Iraq 2003—and how lazy comparisons distort both the risks and the results
Beware of the early consensus on a war! Remember that US interventions in Vietnam and Iraq remained popular for years (in America), until everybody claimed to have been against war all along.
By contrast, the current US and Israeli war on Iran has been unpopular from the start, even in America (see sequential polls by Ipsos, Marist, SSRS, Washington Post, and Quinnipiac University).
Surely, the retrospective unpopularity of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 helps to explain the pre-emptive unpopularity of the strikes on Iran in 2026. And surely war in general should be unpopular.
Yet commentators are not mindful enough about how justifiable prejudices against Iraq 2003 might provoke unjustifiable misreadings of Iran 2026.
False analogies abound!
Mohamed ElBaradei (formerly chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency) said the current war “remind[s] me, unfortunately, of 2003… It’s exactly the same. It’s based on…bogus evidence.” Al Jazeera complains of the revival of the “2003 Iraq playbook.”
Hang on! Yes, the US and UK invented Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003 to justify their rush to war, but Iran is enriching uranium in defiance of its treatied obligations.
In 2025, the IAEA reported that Iran boasts 440 kg of 60 percent U-235, far above the level required for civilian energy production (about 5 percent). US intelligence decided Iran was weeks away from further enriching enough material for at least one nuclear weapon. The 440 kg could be enriched for as many as 10 nuclear weapons, not counting more than ten times as much weight in low enriched uranium.
Iran has been negotiating its way out of illegality for decades, without material punishment, except Israeli cyber-attacks (such as Stuxnet in 2010) and Israeli and US airstrikes (in 2025 and 2026).
Perhaps the US could have peacefully persuaded Iran to give up its enrichment. The US-Iran negotiations of February, mediated by Oman, made sufficient progress, according to Britain’s National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell. But Powell is hardly a credible witness, having repeatedly taken false credit for peace in Northern Ireland, published the ridiculous claim that peace can always be negotiated, and failed to achieve his expectations in his missions to China and the EU within the last year.
The US was probably right to conclude that Iran was just buying time and not serious about a negotiated peace.
If Iran won’t give up its illegal, unnecessary, and suspicious enrichment of uranium, how on earth is the West supposed to stop Iran without kinetic action?
