Same Lies, New War: Trump and the Iraq Playbook

When he ran for president, part of Donald Trump’s appeal stemmed from his opposition to war, in sharp contrast with much of the rest of the Republican Party. “The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake,” he proclaimed during a 2016 debate. “George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”

Trump said this while sharing the stage with candidates who had supported the war, including Bush’s younger brother. For all his faults—and it was clear even at the time that he was no true peacenik—it was refreshing for a major Republican candidate to acknowledge something that, despite being party heresy, was by then abundantly apparent: Iraq was a mistake, it did destabilize the Middle East, and that failure should inform U.S. foreign policy for generations.

But despite running again in 2024 as the “candidate of peace,” Trump is embroiling the U.S. in yet another ill-advised war in the Middle East, bombing Iran at the end of February and declining to rule out the possibility of deploying troops. In the process, he and his administration are making many of the exact same mistakes that got us into Iraq in the first place.

At the outset, Trump boasted that the campaign would “take four weeks or less.”

“Iran cannot outlast us,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added. “You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three. Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo.”

Perhaps that braggadocio could be comforting, conveying confidence that the war really will be over soon. The only problem is that when the Bush administration made the case for invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a nearly identical pledge.

“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that,” Rumsfeld said in November 2002.

Instead, American soldiers spent much of the next two decades [wrong link] there; toppling Hussein created such a vacuum of power that even when we withdrew from the country in 2011, then-President Barack Obama ended up redeploying troops in 2014 to counter the rise of ISIS.

The current administration has insisted it didn’t have a choice. “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon,” Trump said after the strikes.

“Within a week they were going to attack us, 100 percent,” he later added.

Of course, Trump said after bombing Iran in June 2025 that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” And yet within just a few months, Iran had apparently rebuilt such that it was mere days away from possessing a nuclear weapon.

The claim was also contradicted by Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, which concluded last year that Iran could “develop a militarily-viable ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”

This, too, echoes the Bush administration’s case for war, as advanced by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell.

“Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons,” Powell told the United Nations Security Council in February 2003. “We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.”

“America must not ignore the threat gathering against us,” Bush warned. “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

In fact, their information was inaccurate. “It turned out, as we discovered later, that a lot of sources that had been attested to by the intelligence community were wrong,” Powell later admitted, calling his U.N. testimony a “blot” on his record.

The U.S. should only ever go to war with the approval of Congress, after a full presentation of the facts to the American people. Trump, meanwhile, authorized military action in clear violation of the Constitution.

It’s bad enough that Trump’s record never matched his antiwar rhetoric. Worse still is for him to try selling a new Middle Eastern war with the same tired arguments he once implicitly ran against.