Mission accomplished? The 2003 boast that haunts today's Iran conflict

On 9 April 2003 a statue of the leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was pulled down in the centre of Baghdad. The metal plaque at the base of the statue was torn off and the statue's marble plinth attacked with a sledgehammer. Iraqi civilians initially tried to pull it down, scaling the statue to secure a noose around its neck, but were unable to dismantle it. It took help from American troops using an armoured vehicle to finally topple it.

It was a moment that symbolised regime change. US and allied forces had launched their attack on Iraq only 20 days earlier, opening with an intense bombing campaign and an attempted decapitation strike using cruise missiles that targeted the Iraqi leader.

Three weeks on from the statue coming down, America's President, George W Bush, stood aboard a US aircraft carrier, anchored off the Californian coast, behind a banner saying "Mission Accomplished". Except it was anything but.

The shadow of that Iraq war looms large over the current conflict with Iran. It was a war which left deep scars in Iraq as it set in train a series of events which spiralled out of control in a way no one predicted. It left a trail of death and destruction: it is estimated that 461,000 people died in Iraq from war-related causes between 2003 and 2011 and that the war cost the US $3 trillion (£2.24 trillion).

The war reshaped the Middle East and also had a profound effect on the public's trust in politicians in the countries that launched the war.

Today, the US has embarked on what many see as another "war of choice" in the region, this time against Iraq's neighbour, Iran. The echoes and parallels between the two conflicts are certainly there but there are also profound differences which tell us much about how the world has changed since and whether or not a repeat of the failures of Iraq can be avoided.

There were many overlapping motives for Washington to invade Iraq, some not acknowledged publicly at the time. But at the core was the desire for regime change. For some around US President George W Bush there was a feeling of unfinished business from the 1991 Gulf War when Saddam Hussein had been ejected from Kuwait but remained in power.

For President Bush it may also have been even more personal since his father, President George HW Bush, had led that campaign and Hussein had plotted to kill him after. Meanwhile, some believed regime change was justified on human rights grounds. They wanted Hussein's overthrow because of the way he had inflicted terrible violence on his own people – even using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians back in the 1980s.

This fitted in with the era of liberal interventionism that the UK had backed from the 1990s under Tony Blair, intervening in the Balkans to prevent bloodshed in Kosovo. Iraqi exiles also wanted the chance for a new future for their country without the regime they hated.

Then there were those "neo-conservatives" who wanted to reshape the Middle East, bringing democracy and removing dictatorships hostile to the US. Baghdad first, then Tehran, some said, a reminder how long Iran has been on the agenda. And finally after the 11 September attacks in 2001 which killed 2,977 people (not counting the 19 hijackers) after planes were crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pensylvania, there were hawks in Washington who wanted to restore America's deterrent power and show what it could do.

The attacks by al-Qaeda on 9/11 changed the calculus in terms of the level of destruction that could be wrought on America and its allies and very soon Iraq moved to the top of the agenda, even though it had no role in the attacks. Success in routing the Taliban from control of Afghanistan in late 2001, a response to the attacks a few months earlier, also heightened confidence in Washington of what it could do.

But in the end, the justification for war revolved around something else - Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction capabilities – plans for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as missile capabilities. When it came to the British and American public, emphasising the threat posed by these was the easiest way to build public support for military action. Internationally, the failure of Iraq to comply with UN resolutions over its weapons provided a means to seek legitimacy as well.

The weapons were never the real reason though, as Luis Rueda, head of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group at the time, told me later. "We would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein had a rubber band and a paperclip. We would have said 'oh, he will take your eye out. Let's take him out.'"

Today's attack on Iran also seems to emerge from a complex mix of motivations – degrading its military, preventing acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, regime change to create a more pliant state, and supporting the people against a regime that inflicted violence on them, have all been cited by members of Trump's administration.

In many ways, it was the attacks on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 which began a process of changing calculations in Washington as to what could be done to Iran as Israel's risk calculus changed and it began to target Iran and its proxies. That has opened the way for Washington to also take action.

But this time round in the US, there has been no attempt to publicly resolve the sometimes contradictory desires to take action. In fact, US President Donald Trump has himself seemed to veer between them depending on which day he is talking and who to.

Nor has there been any attempt to sell the war to the American public – a process which unfolded over months with Iraq. And nor has there been any attempt to seek international legitimacy through the UN. Back in 2003, there was endless discussion of which states might back action.

This time, the UN and international law have felt irrelevant to the decision makers. All of that speaks to a different world, one in which the old international order has near-collapsed and in which a mercurial president does not feel the need to resolve the different motives at play and provide a coherent justification.

The role of the UK and allies

In 2003, the US went to war with allies, most prominently the UK. Prime Minister Tony Blair had stood alongside President Bush in the run-up, famously writing him a private note in the summer of 2002 saying he would be with the US leader "whatever". His belief – expressed again in recent days when it comes to Iran – was that the UK needed to maximise influence over US policy by getting and remaining close.

"When I was prime minister there was no doubt either under President Clinton or President Bush who the American president picked up the phone to first. It was the British prime minister," he told me in an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of the invasion.

But even some of those closest to him were wary of the level of commitment Blair showed. The "whatever" note "was not a good idea", his then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw later told me.

And critics questioned how much influence Blair managed to get in return back then. He persuaded Washington to go down the route of seeking UN approval. But this was halfhearted on Washington's part and ultimately proved unsuccessful.

When offered a chance to pull out, Blair then declined, saying he believed in the war. "This is where you've got to make these judgements as prime minister at the time," he told me in 2003. "They were offering me the way out because they felt sorry for the politically difficult situation that I was in, but... it would have had a significant impact on the relationship."

And indeed the political price for him would be heavy, especially when the weapons of mass destruction on which he had made the case turned out not to exist. That damaged him and more broadly reduced people's willingness to believe what they were told. "It undermined trust in public life," former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw reflected. "I'm not in any doubt about that."

Trying to deal with Iraq would also consume the last years of George W Bush's presidency and taint his legacy, reshaping American politics. President Obama came to office with a clear desire not to get involved in such interventions again. And remarkably, so did President Trump.

This time round, the US has worked with Israel and not the UK or other allies to attack Iran. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has decided to maintain distance from Washington, refusing the use of UK bases during the original strike though then shifting to allow their use for "defensive" purposes.

That may be due to the lingering memories of Iraq for a bruised Labour Party but also reflects the calculation over how much influence he really could have over President Trump.

A deeper question is how far the UK and US are beginning to move apart. Officials who work on the security and intelligence relationship maintain it remains close, but there is also a sense that closeness may be partly based on inertia as the US increasingly moves to a different security posture, actively undermining the old international order in which the UK has been heavily invested. Previous prime ministers have sometimes kept their distance from Washington's wars – for instance Harold Wilson over Vietnam – but this feels different.

Iraq's legacy is most obvious in the way that leaders in Washington have been at pains to stress the differences between it and the current conflict. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has been explicit that Iran is different to Iraq and will not turn into a "forever war".

One aspect of that is that this time the US is talking about regime change but has not, so far, put in place ground troops to bring it about as they did in 2003 when around 150,000 troops were deployed which led to a fast, effective overthrow of Saddam Hussein (who escaped the initial decapitation strike but was later captured).

The explicit desire to avoid the kind of commitment of troops seen in Iraq limits options – regime change from the air alone is much harder without allying with some kind of insurgent force on the ground.

There has been talk of arming Kurds to fight the Iranian government today. They played their part in 2003 but only alongside the much larger army of troops from the US and its allies.

After the initial victory in 2003 came a long drawn-out occupation as an insurgency and civil war took hold. The US does not want to get drawn into that situation again but the problem is that some of its more expansive aims may be hard to realise without a deeper commitment – notably if it really does want regime change, as opposed to just degrading Iran's military or having a change of leader under the same regime (as happened in Venezuela).

One major parallel between then and now though seems to be the lack of planning for what might come next. This in turn relates to confusion over what the actual aim is. In the case of Iraq in 2003 different visions for the future were never resolved. There was no effective planning for the period after military engagements were completed.

"Where the mistake was made was in trying to create a new government for the Iraqis," former US National Security Adviser John Bolton told me two decades later. "We should have said to the Iraqis: 'Congratulations – form your own government. Here's a copy of the Federalist Papers. Good Luck." That was at variance with those who supported the idea of spreading democracy through the Middle East and wanted to build that in Iraq first.

Iraq is now in a much better state than it was in the immediate aftermath and many are glad to see Saddam Hussein gone. But democracy did not spread through the Middle East in the aftermath as some had claimed it would. Instead, one of the biggest winners of the invasion would be Iran whose main adversary was removed, allowing it to extend its influence into Iraq and beyond in the years after the war. And it would increase the terrorist threat within the UK and the broader West. Wars do not always have the outcomes people expect or want.

Iraq and Iran are very different countries but can lessons be learnt? So far there is little sign of a coherent plan for what the US wants to bring about or what kind of future it envisages for the country. This time, the improvisation seems to be a deliberate strategy as it leaves President Trump with different options for what he can declare as victory before moving on, creating his own "Mission Accomplished" moment.

He could say simply that degrading the Iranian missile and naval capability was enough and that regime change was always something for the Iranian people (even though he talked of wanting it at some points). That would leave a damaged but embittered Iranian regime in power, an outcome closer to the 1991 Gulf War where Saddam Hussein was ejected from Kuwait but left in control in Baghdad. The result was years of tension, occasional bombing, fears of weapons of mass destruction development and eventually another war in 2003.

One lesson of Iraq is that it is easier to break a state in war than to build one afterwards. And parts of the Iranian state are certainly being broken now. The current war is also forcing America's allies – like the UK but particularly in the Gulf states who have been the subject of Iranian attacks – to reconsider how secure they really are.

And the domestic political repercussions for those embarking on war, especially President Trump, could also be unpredictable as the economic fall-out spreads in ways he did not seem to expect.

One possible takeaway is that humility can come in handy when embarking on military interventions. Wars are inherently unpredictable and their outcome and their legacy can resonate for decades.

To picture credit: Anadolu Agency / Gamma- Rapho via Getty Images

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