In 2016, Donald Trump called the invasion of Iraq a “big fat mistake”, the result of a deliberate act of deception by US intelligence.
“They lied!” he said during a Republican primary debate in February that year. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
Now Trump is in the White House, weighing military intervention in a war that has eerie parallels with Operation Iraqi Freedom — a campaign he said was a waste of $2tn.
Then as now, the rationale for war is to stop a country acquiring nuclear weapons and so remove an existential threat to one of America’s closest allies — Israel.
Then, as now, some harbour doubts that the WMD threat is real.
“The intelligence suggests that even though Iran has a nuclear programme, they haven’t been pursuing weaponisation,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East programme at Defense Priorities, a think-tank.
Some have gone further. Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media personality who fiercely opposes any US involvement in another Middle East war, has said the suggestion that Iran is close to building a nuclear bomb is a “lie” peddled by longtime advocates of regime change in Tehran.
“In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb, or has plans to. None,” he wrote on X. “If the US government knew Iran was weeks from possessing a nuclear weapon, we’d be at war already.”
Critics of the rush to war cite the latest annual US intelligence threat assessment, presented to Congress in March by director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — a former Democrat and sceptic of military interventions abroad.
While acknowledging that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was at its highest levels, she insisted Tehran was not building an atomic bomb.
But Trump dismissed that assessment. “I don’t care what she said,” he said on Tuesday when asked about Gabbard’s view. As far as he was concerned, Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon.
Trump is not the only sceptic of the 2025 threat assessment. “It’s exceptionally foolish,” said Elliott Abrams, a foreign policy hawk who served as US special representative for Iran and Venezuela during Trump’s first term. “No country has ever enriched uranium to 60 per cent purity [as Iran has done] without going on to build nuclear weapons.”
He also noted concerns voiced recently by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, about Iran’s failure to adequately co-operate with its inspectors. The IAEA recently declared the Islamic Republic in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in nearly 20 years.
David Petraeus, the retired general and former CIA director who fought in Iraq and once led US Central Command, said it was clear Tehran was “worryingly close” to being able to build a nuclear bomb. “Closer than every before,” he said — even if the country’s leadership might not have decided to make one.
“We have always said we will not allow them to have a nuclear weapon, and we think we will know if they enrich to weapons grade,” he told the Financial Times. “But this is not something that you want to rest on best-case assumptions. You have to worst-case this.”
Others have a similar view.
Suzanne Maloney, a former adviser to the US Department of State on Iran policy, said: “From the very start of this crisis, which goes all the way back to 2002, what Iran has built in terms of industrial-scale enrichment has all the hallmarks of a programme that’s intended for military purposes, not for civil infrastructure and energy production.”
But despite that, Trump’s insistence that Tehran was “a few weeks” from acquiring a nuclear weapon has surprised experts on the region.
Maloney said: “What I worry about . . . is that the president has jumped a few steps ahead of what we know to be fact and drawn a conclusion which is not unreasonable, but is also not supported by intelligence.”
That impression was compounded by the informal way policy is made in Trump’s White House. “The president seems to be making decisions based on his gut rather than on the best advice of informed counsellors,” she said.
Some analysts fear Trump is too susceptible to the influence of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who insisted Iran has a secret plan to weaponise its uranium.
Sceptics also wonder whether the president has accurately judged the mood among US voters, many of whom endorsed his promise to end America’s “forever wars”.
“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are certainly cautionary tales,” said Petraeus.
The debate about Iraq’s supposed WMD programme came just two years after the 9/11 attacks, when Americans were more united behind the need to hit back against the country’s enemies. Opinion on the wisdom of foreign military engagements is more divided now.
Kelanic at Defense Priorities said then-president George W Bush “went to the American people over a span of 18 months to make the case for war, and also went to Congress to get authorisation. The big difference now is just the speed at which this is all unfolding.”
That apparent rush to military action has also exposed lingering tensions between Trump and more isolationist followers in the Maga camp, chief among them Carlson.
Some erstwhile fans of the president have accused him of betraying his “America First” principles by veering dangerously close to the “neoconservative” foreign policy of old, based on unconditional support for Israel, pursuing regime change in hostile countries and acting unilaterally in the world to defend US strategic interests.
The tensions flared in Carlson’s viral interview this week with Ted Cruz, the Republican senator and Trump supporter, who has said the US must support Israel in its war with Iran.
“I want to stop a lunatic who wants to murder us from getting nuclear weapons that could kill millions of Americans,” Cruz told Carlson. “You say I can’t see how that benefits America anyway. That is bizarre . . . isolationism.”
Carlson responded by mocking Cruz’s foreign policy credentials and said he did not “know anything about the country whose government you want to overthrow”.
While some in the pro-Trump coalition are wary of the president’s shift in direction on Iran, others said it was wrong to suggest he had suddenly become a neoconservative.
“If you go back almost exactly 10 years, June 6 2015, when he came down the escalator and declared his candidacy . . . he said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” said Abrams, himself seen as one of the leading neocons of the Bush era. “He has been completely consistent on this.”
