West Point Professor John Spencer takes issue with all those pundits and self-proclaimed security experts who insist that the American bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites is akin to the war we waged against Iran for eight years, and, they warn us, is leading us inexorably into another costly “forever war.” Spencer explains all the ways that the comparison fails to hold. “No, US strikes on Iran are not the start of a new ‘forever war’ in the Middle East – opinion,” by John Spencer, Jerusalem Post, June 23, 2025:
We are hearing it again. From the random comedian turned geopolitical analyst, the podcast influencer, and the back seat foreign policy expert. “Remember Iraq,” they say. “Forever war.”
As if that one phrase ends the conversation. The uninformed reflex is to think of years of troop deployments, endless insurgencies, wasted lives, and strategic quagmires. The instinct is understandable. But it risks misreading the moment we are in. Because Iran is not Iraq. It is not Afghanistan. And this is not the same war.
Israel and the United States are not talking about regime change. That is not the mission. The mission is clear and limited. It is to irreversibly destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That is it. Not to occupy Tehran. Not to rebuild Iran’s government. Not to democratize the Middle East. The goal is singular: to stop the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from acquiring the most dangerous weapon on earth.
Many invoke Iraq as a cautionary tale. I was on the ground as an American soldier, sent on missions to find those exact weapons of mass destruction. They were not there. The United States invaded Iraq based on intelligence assessments that turned out to be catastrophically wrong. There were no active WMD programs, yet that claim became the justification for war. But the greatest failure came after Baghdad fell. The mission shifted from regime removal to vague, open-ended nation building, with no clear plan and no unified political strategy.
Then came one of the most damaging decisions in modern US history. The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the entire Iraqi military, sending hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers home without jobs, income, or direction. At the same time, a sweeping de-Ba’athification policy purged virtually every experienced civil servant from government, not for war crimes or corruption, but for their affiliation with a ruling party they had often joined just to survive professionally.
These moves collapsed Iraq’s governing institutions overnight and left a vacuum that was immediately filled by chaos, insurgency, and extremist groups. The failure was not in the use of force, but in what came after—a rushed deconstruction of a functioning state with no viable plan to rebuild it.
The intelligence in the lead-up to Iraq was thin, ambiguous, and in some cases outright fabricated. A single CIA source, later discredited, claimed Saddam Hussein had restarted biological weapons programs. The infamous claim that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Africa was based on forged documents. Analysts pointed to aluminum tubes as possible centrifuge components, even after the Department of Energy and other experts dismissed the theory.
Much of the intelligence was politicized, cherry-picked, and presented with far more confidence than it deserved. Conspiracy and historical revisionism have since claimed that the government intentionally lied. But it is far more likely that a combination of fear, urgency, and human error in the wake of September 11 led to a cascade of bad assumptions, institutional groupthink, and confirmation bias.
That is not the case with Iran. The IAEA has hard data, not vague suspicion. It has verified uranium enriched to 83.7 percent. It has documented missing stockpiles and hidden facilities. The only historical comparison is not Iraq in 2003, but Iraq in 1981, when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor before Saddam could complete his program. The world later saw that act for what it was: a necessary preemptive strike that likely prevented a future disaster. The situation with Iran today is even more urgent….
It is important to realize that other presidents before Trump have used military force without prior congressional authorization, in Syria, in Libya, in Grenada. He was only following their precedent. His security officials had determined that Iran was within a week of being able to produce a single nuclear weapon, and he could not wait for the long process of obtaining, after heated and lengthy debate, congressional approval of an attack on Iran’s three most important nuclear sites.
Those who want to score political points against Trump accuse him of leading America into one more of those “forever wars,” like the eight-year war in Iraq and the twenty-year war in Afghanistan. Not at all. This was a single raid by American bombers (and Tomahawk missiles), lasting only twenty-five minutes. That raid does not constitute a “war.” No American boots were, or will be, on the ground. There are no plans to change the regime, though of course such a change would be welcomed in Washington. Those who are claiming that we are now on a slippery slope to a full-scale war with Iran that could last many years, and involve huge occupation forces, are simply trying to scare us into refraining from any more attacks, should Iran now “retaliate” for the June 21 raid. This is not something Trump is prepared to do. He has already warned Iran not to harm a single American soldier or civilian, or else face terrible consequences. But this, too, will not amount to the “forever war” we are being warned about.
somehistory says
Stupid and arrogant people will use any phrase or slogan to win an argument.
The guy hits his wife and when she complains about the abuse, he says, “Well you drove the car without checking the oil.”
It’s really tiresome to hear so many *experts* telling us what should be done and who should do it.
I saw where Trump said something to aoc and she responded by calling herself a “silly girl” She’s a lot worse than that, and the self-description doesn’t change her arrogant lying.
How many people who are making the comparison were even alive at the time of the terror attack in NYC? Or how many were adults at that time and know everything now?
Bible prophecy: “You will hear of wars and reports of wars.” “The rider on the red horse with the long sword has been granted to take peace away from the Earth.”
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Like I’ve said, I now disagree w/ the conventional wisdom here. Let’s say that nothing was done about the nuke sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, but the regime was toppled. Let’s say the ayatollah and his immediate prospective successors were assassiniated, like Nasrallah and his, the IRGC & Basij was bombed, Evin prison’s door blown up (like has happened) and the islamic regime got completely overthrown and replaced either by Reza Pahlavi, or a democratic setup that followed his blueprint laid out today
In such a scenario, Iran’s nukes would no more be a threat to anybody else in the region, just like India’s. Iran wouldn’t be threatened, neither would Saudi Arabia or any of the islamic regime’s enemies. Chances are more likely that the new Iranian government would have started a program to recoup its costs by converting those into a real energy reactor to provide clean energy to much of Iran, freeing up more oil for either export or internal transportation. It would have been a win-win for everyone involved
I don’t blame the US for not wanting to drive regime change, given the somewhat Utopian concepts of what our past leaders, like President Bush, thought it should be. I do blame US for trying to prevent regime change in Iran, by preventing Israel from continuing what it has been doing the last few days ever since the B2s bombed those sites – destroying IRGC & Basij offices, killing their members and doing other things destroying institutions of the islamic republic
I just watched a JNS show The Quad, which today featured 2 Iranians outside the country. They discussed some of the reasons why Iranians have not been rising up against the regime, despite all the work that the IDF has been doing. One of them being that there is an internet blackout throughout the country imposed by the regime, and even though Musk made Starlink free for the time being, there aren’t stations in Iran to receive and rebroadcast those signals. The other has been the reign of terror by these groups over the last 40+ years, where whenever there was any setback to the regime, they turned their wrath on the people of Iran. I get some of the apprehension, but ultimately, it’s the Iranian people who’d have to overthrow the regime. The Israelis can and have helped, but they can’t do it all for them. Although killing the ayatollah and everyone around him might be something that either would like to do
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lwRUBUxXPjw
Hopefully, in the next few days, enough Iranians gain the courage to rise up in enough places throughout Iran to overwhelm the islamic regime, and finally terminate it. It’s not like Israel will have nothing to worry about after that: there will be Turkey and its proteges in the region, like Qatar, Fatah, the muslim brotherhood & so on. But hopefully, there are more mechanisms for Israel to force the West (ie US) to put pressure on the Turks. But at least Iran will no longer be an issue