The Opposite of Iraq

Trump goes to war

Mar 03, 2026

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning’s presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:

To the media outlets and political left screaming, “Endless wars.” Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he’s right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the “exact opposite“ of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it’s not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not “endless” because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself.

That’s what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they’re hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela’s new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more “pragmatic” faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you’re urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he’s expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he’s trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that’s really who’s giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he’s publicly against the war), doesn’t think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work.

It’s hard to guess what MBS is up to with his double game. Netanyahu, in contrast, seems to have left his footprints all over the place, but there’s some room for doubt on that too. A week ago, Trump administration officials were telling Politico that they hoped Israel would attack Iran on its own, helping to give the US some political cover for when it joined the assault afterwards, in the pattern established last summer, when Israel began its surprise bombing on June 13 and the US made its “obliteration” run on the 22nd. After the war began on Saturday, as a joint Israeli-US operation after all, Secretary of State Rubio explained by turning this idea upside down: Israel was going to start bombing immediately no matter what, and therefore Iran would attack the US in retaliation; thusNetanyahu’s plan to start bombing Iran immediately constituted an imminent threat to the US, so the US had to participate in it; or as Seth Hettena put it,

The Secretary of State would like to add that, yes, there was also an imminent threat that forced our hand. Israel was going to attack Iran, after which Iran was going to attack us back, which meant that we had no choice but to attack Iran first, to defend ourselves from the Iranian attack that would have followed the Israeli attack that hadn’t happened yet, to preempt the retaliation that was sure to follow, proactively, in a defensive way.

Then, when American citizens in Israel warned by the State Department to get out of Israel found they couldn’t get out because the airports were closed due to the ongoing air war—Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee was suggesting they take a tour bus to Egypt and see if they could find a flight out somewhere down there—Rubio explained that wasn’t his fault either, it was because Israel had closed the airspace, as if his ongoing airwar had nothing to do with that:

Netanyahu is further responsible for choosing the successor to Ayatollah Khamenei, according to reporting from Axios (”He had the successor picked out”), though also for having the successor killed in the same bombing raid with the late Supreme Leader, and was engaged with Trump in coordinating the popular uprising in Iran as well, leading negotiations with the well-armed and experienced Iraqi Kurdish forces, who would cross the border with their refugee relatives and friends to the other side—

Six days before the war began, five dissident Kurdish groups sheltering in Iraq announced the formation of the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan to fight Iran

—and change the regime from there.

Iran’s ethnoreligious division. Central Intelligence Agency 2004, via Wikipedia.

Because another thing Iran has in common with Iraq is diversity, with only 60% of the population being ethnic Persian and very substantial populations of Kurds (crosscutting Shi’a and Sunni), Arabs, Azeris, Turkmen (Sunni), Balochi (Sunni), and others, and serious tensions on the borders (Syria, Iraq, and Turkey for the Kurds, Pakistan for the Balochi), a recipe for very long-lasting instability. I don’t think Hegseth and Rubio are very informed about that either, though the CIA certainly should be.

Also I'm not sure the Kurds have any reason to trust Trump:

Emptywheel thinks the CIA and Pentagon (the working part, not the Hegseth part) are busy covering their asses before the disaster becomes clear, leaking warnings of how bad it's going to be. The post-Khamenei rule will likely be more vicious and brutal than anything seen before (this was prefigured in the killings of this January—in the worst unrest Iran had experienced before then, over the death of the young Kurdish woman arrested for not wearing her veil properly, Mahsa Amini, in 2023, fewer than 600 protesters were killed, which is obviously very bad but nothing compared to the January massacres killing anywhere between 7,000 and 36,000.