One of the most famous moments in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 was when the then State Secretary Colin Powell called the Rule rule of Pottery Barn over the Middle East: “If you break it, you buy it.”
Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened then, because the war turned into a 12-year-old slog in which nearly 5,000 American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice without reaching the goal of a stable and modern Iraq.
That is the cloud under which American B-2-bombers the night sky in Iran on Sunday, just after 12 hours of local time, pierced and three Iranian nuclear facilities attack in an operation that was dubbed appropriate Midnight hammer.
Rubio explains the days of Iran about ‘playing the world’ after Trump’s decisive attack
What the Trump government understands here is that although it is good to learn the lessons of the war in Iraq, it is bad to be paralyzed by them, and Saturday’s strike was a good example of both principles.
It is clear that the most essential difference between this weekend’s strike in Iran and the war in Iraq is that we don’t even have boots on the ground in Iran, much less designs to occupy it, which created the Quagmire of Iraq.
File – This satellite photo of Planet Labs PBC shows the Natanz -Nuclear facility in Iran on May 20, 2025. (Planet Labs PBC via AP, File)
At the time we had army colonels who, instead of leading fights, tried to negotiate with rival tribal leaders in a culture they hardly had to understand, and no, they were not greeted as liberators.
That leads us to the second big difference between now and the war in Iraq. Trump only uses the army for military actions, not some vague viceregal nation structure and police mission.
A third big distinction between Iraq and our current hard place is that the Iran government is still intact. In Baghdad there was no one in the lead after Sadaam Hussein was chased. Here, supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini can still come to his senses and give up the nuclear weapon program of his country, or whatever remains.
Last but not least, the war in Iraq square was led by the United States, with our “coalition of the willing” at some distance behind us. This is a war between Israel and Iran. The only thing we did was help a narrow ally with a mission that did not cause Iranian deaths.
The American State Secretary Marco Rubio said that the strikes in Iran are not the start of a war with our involvement. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty images)
On Sunday morning, both State Secretary Marco Rubio And Vice President JD Vance made the TV circuit and both unambiguously stated that the United States is not “at war” with Iran, the opposite of 2003.
Any choice that Trump made on Iran, to attack, not to attack, would be at risk. And there is certainly a legitimate fear that Iran could react with attacks on our troops in the region, or even a terror attack in the US that would pull us in a meat mill in the middle East.
But this was also where Trump killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Swift and deadly revenge was promised by the Mullahs, but it never happened. They knew then, and probably still, that a broader war against America is madness.
In the meantime, in contrast to Barack Obama, who pulled more redlines in the sand of the middle -old than Yosemite Sam, while he never supported it, Trump only showed the enemies of America that he will do what he says. That is such a powerful negotiating tool as there can be.
Even a few hours after the attack, flawlessly carried away by Defense -Secretary Pete Hegseeth and his armed forcesYou can feel that there is no great fear of a wider war here.
Democrats, with a few exceptions, such as Staart Israel supporter Senator John Fetterman, from Pennsylvania, are upset that Trump has not received an approval from the congress. But they don’t really warn of Forever Wars.
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The non-interventionist wing of the Maga movement, which was very loudly online against military action, has lost this internal battle, but is usually back in the fold. Nobody wins them all.
In the end, Trump did what he always does. He looked at a problem that everyone said that there was no solution, such as moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, or closing the border, and decided that he would be the one who finally took the door for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
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A week before Saturday’s attack, the American army celebrated its 250th birthday with a military parade in Washington DC critics called it useless, or self-glorification by Trump, while in fact it was a representation of the incomparable military power of America.
On Saturday Iran and his supreme leader learned that those lines of marching troops, which were much more, much more than just a parade.
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