If at first you don’t succeed, make more problems for yourself. That seems to be the mantra in Washington when it comes to the Middle East. Every few years, a U.S. president asks Americans to go along with a small military commitment in the region—or starts one without asking the public. Almost inevitably, it causes bigger problems than promised.
Friends turn into enemies. The chaos allows bad actors to grow, or creates new factions with a reason to resent America. The political goalposts shift; the U.S. government discovers that a problem it didn’t care about before is actually a “vital interest.” And time after time, politicians promise that all these problems can go away with just one more decisive strike against the real cause of conflict in the region. No forever war is ever advertised that way from the beginning.
President Donald Trump is speedrunning this whole problem. Just a month ago, he was promising the end of “nation building” and grandiose “neocon” schemes. Now, he’s directly entered the Israeli-Iranian war by bombing Iran. While Vice President J.D. Vance tried to claim that “we’re not at war with Iran” and the attack would be a one-off incident, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump himself have both hinted that the U.S. will escalate to regime change if Iran does not surrender. Here’s how we got to this point—and some of the times we’ve seen this movie before.
The roots of America’s military presence in the modern Middle East are in the informal U.S.-Saudi alliance created during World War II. An American oil consortium had begun operating in the kingdom soon after its unification in the 1930s, so the Roosevelt administration built an airbase in Saudi Arabia to protect the oilfields and added the Saudi government to the lend-lease program for wartime allies.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously met King Abdulaziz Al Saud on the USS Quincy in February 1945, promising U.S. help in building a modern Saudi army in exchange for continued American access to Saudi oil. That seemingly innocuous trade was the end of the British Empire’s dominance in the region, and the beginning of a long U.S. entanglement instead.
How it went wrong: Created an unwritten, entangling alliance for decades to come.
The U.S.-Saudi deal inspired Iran to try to renegotiate its arrangement with Britain in 1951, whose state-owned oil company had a concession for Iranian oil fields. The issue wasn’t just resources. The Iranian parliament, led by the charismatic Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was trying to limit the power of the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mossadegh nationalized the oil fields, provoking a British blockade, while also clashing with the shah over domestic policy.
Mossadegh trusted the United States as a neutral mediator, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. The Eisenhower administration suspected that Mossadegh was too close to communists, and the CIA supported a coup d’etat by destabilizing the country. In August 1953, after months of protests subsidized by the U.S. and the U.K., monarchist generals in contact with the CIA surrounded Mossadegh’s house with tanks, bringing the shah back to near-absolute power.
Instead of allowing Britain to regain its dominance over Iran, the Eisenhower administration forced Iran to accept an American-led oil consortium. And the CIA helped train the shah’s fearsome new secret police, the SAVAK. When the shah finally fell in 1979, young revolutionaries took revenge by raiding the U.S. embassy, which they called a “den of spies,” and holding everyone inside hostage for more than a year. That began a 46-year conflict that continues to this day.
How it went wrong: Caused a nation that trusted America to have an anti-American revolution.
The Iranian crisis was one of the events that prompted Egypt to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956, which was under the control of an Anglo-French consortium. The British Empire was rapidly slipping away, and London felt it couldn’t afford another loss. Prime Minister Anthony Eden hatched a plan with the leaders of France and Israel to wrestle back control of the canal. Israel invaded Egypt, and then Britain and France sent their troops to the canal as “peacekeepers,” pretending to be shocked by the violence.
U.S. intelligence caught wind of the plot before it even began. Unlike in Iran, the Eisenhower administration didn’t side with Britain over Egypt. President Dwight D. Eisenhower thought that a colonial land grab was reckless for the Western position, especially after the Soviet Union threatened to join the war on Egypt’s side. The United States, working through the United Nations, pressured the three invaders to withdraw.
Two years later, the Lebanese government invited the U.S. military to help maintain order in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, during a political crisis. The American troops stayed for three months, and Lebanese politicians worked out a compromise among themselves. But America’s days as an impartial arbiter would soon end.
How it went wrong: The exception that proves the rule. Diplomacy and neutrality were a path not taken for America.
In the mid-1970s, Iran and Israel were backing a rebellion by the Kurdish minority against the government of Iraq, their mutual rival. Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani was hopeful about American help; he gave President Richard Nixon a tiger skin and declared he was ready for Kurdistan to “become the 51st state.” But the Nixon administration cynically instructed the CIA to simply “continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country,” referring to Iraq.
In 1975, the shah made a surprise agreement with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. In exchange for more territory in the Persian Gulf, the Iranian government abruptly pulled the rug out from under the Kurdish rebellion, cutting off all support while the Iraqi army advanced.
The Nixon administration was ruthless towards its defeated Kurdish proxies: National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger infamously quipped that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work” and that the United States can “promise [Kurds] anything, give them what they get, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”
After reading a leaked report about the betrayal, however, a U.S. diplomat in Tehran pushed to get Kurds asylum in America. Many settled in Nashville, Tennessee. The 1975 crackdown would not be the last time Kurds experienced Kissinger’s dictum. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush egged on uprisings against the Iraqi government only to watch as the rebels were crushed. In 2019, Trump promised to mediate between Syrian Kurds and Turkey, only to green-light a Turkish invasion after the Syrian Kurdish forces dismantled their fortifications.
How it went wrong: Raised and then crushed the hopes of an otherwise pro-American people.
Soon after the Iranian monarchy fell in 1979, Iraq invaded Iran. The United States switched from using Iran as a weapon against Iraq to using Iraq as a weapon against Iran. The Reagan administration gave diplomatic cover, financial aid, covert weapons shipments, and intelligence support to the Iraqi government. It even helped whitewash the Iraqi use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians.
When Iran and Iraq began attacking each other’s oil exports, the U.S. Navy stepped in to defend Iraqi shipping. In May 1987, the Iraqi military mistook the USS Stark for an Iranian tanker, attacking it and killing 37 American sailors. And in July 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian passenger plane for a fighter jet, shooting it down and killing 290 civilians.
While protecting Iraq, the Reagan administration maintained a backchannel to Iran. The covert diplomacy started with an offer to sell weapons to Iran via Israel in exchange for freeing American hostages held by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. This later grew into a much larger scheme, known as Iran-Contra, to use the secret arms sales to fund Nicaraguan guerrillas against the will of Congress.
America’s double-dealing helped prolong the war until 1988. “It’s a pity they both can’t lose,” Kissinger famously said.
How it went wrong: Worsened Iran’s distrust of America and empowered Iraq to threaten its other neighbors.
The same year as the Iranian revolution, Afghanistan was undergoing its own turmoil. A communist government had taken power in April 1978 and was coming apart at the seams. The Soviet Union actually considered Afghan communist leader Hafizullah Amin an unhinged, unpredictable liability, so in December 1979, the Red Army marched into Afghanistan to kill Amin and install a more pliant government. (America is not the only country to suffer imperial hubris.)
The U.S. government saw “the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war,” in the words of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Operation Cyclone, the effort to back mujahideen (holy warriors) against communism in Afghanistan, became the largest CIA operation in history. Billions of dollars flowed to the rebels, who killed at least 15,000 Soviet troops over nine years.
U.S. partners such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia joined in, funneling foreign fighters to join the mujahideen, hopped up on religious fervor against communist atheism. One of them was a young Osama bin Laden. After Soviet troops left in 1989, the country fell into chaos. A theocratic movement known as the Taliban defeated the former mujahideen warlords and took power in 1996.
How it went wrong: Created a den of Islamist militancy—eventually leading to the 9/11 attacks.
A civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975, and Palestinian guerrillas took advantage of the uncontrolled border to attack Israel. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was convinced that he had an opportunity to “remake the whole of the Middle East” through regime change in Lebanon, as the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman put it in his 2018 book, Rise and Kill First. Israeli intelligence officers told Bergman that they even created a fake terrorist group to sow more chaos and justify a larger intervention.
Israeli forces managed to overrun Beirut, expel the Palestine Liberation Organization, and install a new president, Bachir Gemayel, in August 1982. But the project fell apart the following month, when Gemayel was assassinated by his own countrymen, and undisciplined Israeli-backed militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Israel settled on occupying a “security belt” in southern Lebanon for the next 18 years, while U.S. peacekeepers moved into Beirut for the second time in history.
The Shia Muslim community in the south, which had originally welcomed Israeli troops with flowers, was coming to resent the foreign soldiers in their home region, leading to the rise of Hezbollah. One of the militia’s first and most notorious acts was an attack on the peacekeepers’ barracks in 1983, which killed 241 U.S. troops. President Ronald Reagan decided to end the peacekeeping mission. Hezbollah continued to fight Israel even after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
How it went wrong: Spawned a fearsome, decades-long enemy for Israel and dragged the U.S. into the conflict.
From Reagan’s first few days in office, his administration was drawing up plans to overthrow the erratic Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who it identified as both a pawn of Soviet influence in Africa and a “mad dog” exporting international terrorism. In the spring of 1986, the U.S. military began building up forces off the Libyan coast, sinking two Libyan patrol boats.
Then a bomb killed two American soldiers at a Berlin nightclub, an attack the Reagan administration blamed on Libyan intelligence. The U.S. military bombed Tripoli, the capital, with the hope of killing Ghadafi or at least driving him over the edge. Gadhafi survived the air raids, declared victory, and continued sponsoring militants and gangsters around the world. After the Cold War, he changed his tune and normalized relations with the U.S. From Gadhafi’s perspective, that turned out to be a fatal mistake.
How it went wrong: Left Ghadafi in power and unhinged.
The Iraqi government ended the war with Iran in 1988 with a huge debt to neighboring Kuwait. The fact that Iraq also had a much bigger army than Kuwait created a dangerous temptation to settle that debt through rather unconventional means. Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and quickly annexed it. There’s some controversy about whether U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie accidentally encouraged Saddam Hussein by saying “we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts.”
Either way, an all-out invasion crossed a line, especially because Iraq was threatening Saudi Arabia as well. The U.S. led an international coalition to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and destroy Iraq’s army, along with 92 percent of its electrical capacity, 80 percent of its oil refining capacity, and other basic infrastructure. The war was relatively cost-free for Americans, and President George H.W. Bush bragged that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
But the intervention didn’t end there. The U.S. continued to impose a crushing economic embargo against Iraq and no-fly zones over large parts of the country. And in the name of enforcing United Nations resolutions, Washington bombed Iraq several times over the 1990s. Iraq became a festering sore of U.S. foreign policy, and many American officials began to hope for regime change.
How it went wrong: Never ended conclusively, set the stage for a big regime change war.
“What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” Brzezinski said in a 1998 interview, defending America’s support for the mujahideen.
That statement did not age well. On September 11, 2001, “some agitated Moslems” flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,977 people. They were loyal to bin Laden, who had returned to Afghanistan as a guest of the Taliban and was now operating an anti-American network known as Al Qaeda. The CIA activated its old allies to overthrow the Taliban, and U.S. troops flowed into Afghanistan to join the fight and then prop up a new Afghan government.
Not all of the veteran mujahideen sided with their former American backers. Jalaluddin Haqqani, whom Rep. Charlie Wilson (D–Texas) had called “goodness personified,” pledged allegiance to the Taliban. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notorious drug dealer who had been supported by the CIA, ran his own freelance insurgency against the U.S.-backed republic.
Despite the death of bin Laden in 2011—curiously, he turned out to be hiding on the territory of U.S. partner Pakistan, a mile away from its military academy—the Obama administration decided to stay in Afghanistan to continue the nation-building project. It also began a campaign of drone strikes over the Pakistani border.
A republic of warlords turned out to be neither a popular nor a competent replacement for the Taliban, who learned to bide their time. After 20 years of inconclusive, brutal war, the U.S. agreed to pull its troops out of Afghanistan. Unlike the communist government, which lasted a few months after Soviet troops withdrew, the U.S.-backed government fell before the last American soldiers had even left the country.
How it went wrong: Wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, only to result in the same Taliban government that existed before.
Yemen has suffered an overlapping series of conflicts since the 1990s, and the United States has been there for many of them. One of Al Qaeda’s first attacks against U.S. forces was the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which was refueling in Yemen. In 2002, the Bush administration began a covert assassination campaign against Al Qaeda in Yemen, which the Obama administration escalated to a full-scale drone war. Notoriously, President Barack Obama had an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, killed by a drone in Yemen.
Islamist rebels known as the Houthis seized control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in 2014. With backing from the Obama administration, neighboring Saudi Arabia intervened to put the old government back in power. After a brutal war that led to mass civilian killing and a near famine, Saudi Arabia backed down. But the Houthi government began attacking foreign shipping in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2023, leading the Biden administration to directly attack Yemen. Trump tried to win that war through escalation, then finally pulled the plug on it.
How it went wrong: Failed at its goals and turned Yemen into a Saudi-U.S. quagmire.
At least at the beginning, the counterterrorism campaign against Al Qaeda was too small to satisfy Americans. Many elites wanted a more dramatic way to tell the Muslim world to—in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—”suck on this.” Iraq, the besieged dictatorship, seemed like an easy target.
President George W. Bush got to work selling fantasies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—both the chemical weapons that the Reagan administration had covered up, and a nuclear weapons program that had been on ice for a decade—and about links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
“I do not believe this is a rush to war,” then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.) said during the congressional war authorization vote. “I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur.”
Cheered on by Congress and the media, the U.S. military set to work dismantling the Iraqi state in March 2003. American troops found Saddam Hussein hiding in a foxhole and handed him over to be hanged after a show trial. Then a civil war broke out. The ham-fisted effort at nation-building essentially handed the country over to Shia Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurdish militias. U.S.-backed gunmen tortured their enemies with power drills. Bodies stacked up from daily suicide bombings. Al Qaeda, flushed out of Afghanistan, now had a new playground. Iran successfully infiltrated the new Iraqi state.
The Bush administration stabilized the situation with the “surge,” a strategy of cracking down and then paying off militias to switch sides. Americans elected Obama in large part to wash their hands of Iraq, and the Iraqi government itself wanted its foreign backers to leave. Obama duly pulled out all U.S. forces (except for embassy guards) in 2011.
How it went wrong: Turned Iraq into a plaything of Iran and Al Qaeda.
The Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings that began in Tunisia and Egypt, seemed to be a chance for Arabs to finally take control of their own destiny. Washington, however, seemed to see it as a chance to finally do military regime change right. When the uprisings spread to Libya and a civil war erupted, the U.N. Security Council approved a no-fly zone to protect civilians. The United States and its allies turned that mission into a full-bore war on the Libyan government. With U.S. help, Libyan rebels captured Gadhafi and sodomized him to death in October 2011.
“We came, we saw, he died,” then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cackled. Libya erupted again into civil war between rival rebel groups. Some of the most infamous incidents from that war include an open-air slave market run by human traffickers, an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, and a mass beheading of Christian Egyptian workers on a beach. The violence spread south, with a string of violent Islamist rebellions erupting across Africa. Although the fighting in Libya itself has simmered down somewhat, the country is still split between two rival governments, one of which came close to collapsing this year.
How it went wrong: Unleashed brutal civil war and exported violence across Africa.
The country worst hit by the crackdowns on the Arab Spring was Syria, where ruler Bashar Assad clung to power with extreme violence and backing from Russia and Iran. After he used chemical weapons against a crowded city in 2013, the Obama administration considered launching yet another military intervention, but it instead settled on having the CIA arm rebels—many of whom were Islamists.
Meanwhile, a split within Al Qaeda led to the rise of the apocalyptic Islamic State group, which took over large parts of both Syria and Iraq. The U.S. military rushed back to Iraq to save the Iraqi government, and allied with Syrian Kurdish rebels to pursue the war over the border. Those campaigns morphed into a much broader effort to fight Iran by proxy, including by killing Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. At some points, the CIA-backed and U.S. military-backed rebels fought each other.
In a twist of irony, Assad fell suddenly in December 2024 to exactly the man the U.S. had wanted to keep out of power: Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former Al Qaeda leader. In another ironic twist, Sharaa ended up being the first Syrian leader to have normal relations with the United States in decades. Even though the conflict is over, the U.S. military is still keeping a base in Syria, ostensibly to fight Islamic State remnants. Who knows what it will be used for in the future?
How it went wrong: Failed at all its goals, and set the stage for decades more U.S. intervention.
Like every administration before it, the Trump administration is insisting that its new war with Iran will be smarter, savvier, and cleaner. “Back then, we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives,” Vance said. It was the same promise Obama made in 2009: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” And that promise will likely age just as badly—with consequences that no one, not even war skeptics, could have predicted.
reason.com (Article Sourced Website)
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