Uncanny Echoes of Iraq
My new essay for New Lines Magazine on Trump channeling Bush in Iraq, while desperately insisting his war with Iran "is not Iraq."
A defense secretary promises a war that won’t last more than a few weeks. A secretary of state insists on the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify a “preemptive” war. A president, in announcing the start of that war, vows to bring freedom to the people under ferocious American bombardment.
There are some clear differences between President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq — most of all, the Bush administration’s long run-up to the invasion, selling Americans on the fiction that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a direct threat to the United States (and, for good measure, that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda). By contrast, the T…
