The US may send thousands of troops to Iran. Have we learned nothing from the past?

As I write in The Guardian, the US, in 2003, claimed its Iraq incursion would be brief. Now there’s competition for the title of worst-planned war in American history.

The US-Israel war on Iran is a colossal blunder of world historical proportions. As clear an act of aggression as one can imagine, the war is blatantly illegal, continuing the death blow to international law and norms that began (most recently) with Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

The war has also been launched with magnificently poor planning, as the United States seems shocked by and unprepared for how Iran uses every means at its disposal to restrict shipping in the strait of Hormuz. And with the massive disruption to the international supply of energy and certain necessary commodities, the global economy is teetering on collapse, with the United States and Israel mortgaging the futures of many poorer nations around the world – especially in Asia and Africa – for their own imperial adventurism.

Now, in what could be a sign of significant escalation after a month of this needless and immoral war, the Pentagon is poised to move thousands of ground troops into the region and readying itself for “weeks” of possible ground operations, according to reports.

Why is this happening again? Have we learned nothing from the past?

More than two decades ago, on 7 February 2003, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told American troops in Europe that any invasion of Iraq would be brief. “It is not knowable how long that conflict would last,” Rumsfeld said. “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” With his signature aphoristic speaking style, Rumsfeld might have sounded like a poet to some, but it turns out he was a pretty lousy military planner.

That illegal US-led war began on 20 March 2003, and US combat troops remained in Iraq not for six months but for close to nine years. And that’s if we take official pronouncements at face value. Officially, American combat troops left the country in 2011, but US forces in other roles have remained in Iraq, including in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, since the 2003 invasion.

As we all now know, the US never discovered the feared “weapons of mass destruction” that ostensibly led to the war, nor was the US able to transform Iraq into a vassal state. That didn’t mean the war wasn’t enormously costly in terms of lives and expenditures. By 2006, the war had contributed to more than half a million Iraqi deaths, according to a cross sectional survey published in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet. US taxpayers had spent a staggering $1.92tn to support the war by 2020. Meanwhile, more than 4,500 American soldiers were killed. Iraqi society was decimated.

In his 2006 book Fiasco, the Washington Post’s senior Pentagon reporter Thomas Ricks wrote that the invasion of Iraq “was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history. It was a campaign plan for a few battles, not a plan to prevail and secure victory.”

There may now be competition to Ricks’s damning assessment. When the US-led invasion of Iraq began, the US had assembled a force of 150,000 troops to invade Iraq. The UK contributed about 46,000 troops for the invasion, and other nations also contributed. The combined forces numbered almost 250,000 troops at the time of the invasion. And Iraq, it should be noted, is a much smaller country than Iran, both in terms of population and geography.

This time around, as the US is signaling that it may send ground troops into Iran, it has at its disposal a force of about 50,000 troops in the Middle East. This is only 10,000 more than are usually in the area. The mission objectives being talked about for these US troops – everything from occupying Iranian territory to locating and removing Iran’s stockpiled uranium to seizing control of key islands – seem to me, someone who admittedly is not a military strategist, to be, shall I say, aspirational.

This is not to say that I subscribe to any part of this war. It’s an insult to civilization. It’s also a continuation of the 2003 Iraq invasion. The US believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying a major Arab country would forever tilt the dynamics of the region toward Uncle Sam. That didn’t happen. Instead, Iraq’s old rival Iran emerged with much more clout and influence in the years since American boots hit the ground in Baghdad. If the thought now is that Iran must be demolished the way Iraq was demolished, one wonders who the next winner from the limited thinking of US politicians will be. Will it be Russia? Or China? Or both?…

Read the rest here.