After a year of purging Middle East experts from the administration, President Donald Trump is reportedly receiving video briefings on the Iran War that feature “stuff blowing up,” and his former defense secretary, James Mattis, is telling audiences, “What we’re seeing is a situation where targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy.” Middle East Policy’s free special issue, Washington’s War on Iran, provides insights into Trump’s prosecution of the conflict by tracing the parallels with the last major US regime-change mission in the Gulf, the Iraq War.
The 14 free-to-read articles in this special issue explain Tehran’s response to the June 2025 war, the development of a Sunni-Israeli alliance against Iran, how the Islamic Republic tried to take advantage of the US-China rivalry, and Tehran’s attempt to develop a regime-preservation network by looking East. It also takes a deep dive into the key pillars of Iran’s defense strategy, the clerical-military leadership, and the roots of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hostility toward the United States. The studies also explore the country’s weaknesses through the voices of protesters, data on poverty, and a probe of its oil trade under crippling sanctions. If you find this newsletter useful, please forward it to others you believe will benefit; register to receive our weekly updates here. And please follow us on the social media platforms X and LinkedIn.
One of the key articles in the special issue, W. Patrick Lang’s “Drinking the Kool-Aid,” is a must-read analysis of the groupthink that emerged as George W. Bush and his administration entered office in 2001 determined to oust Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. “The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the ‘bearers’ of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States,” Lang asserts, “and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined.”
Lang, a veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides a detailed review of the perversion of the interagency process that led to Bush’s declaration of war on Iraq in March 2003. The purging and derailing of those with expertise empowered a small group of insiders dedicated to regime change. “Ten days into the Bush administration”—long before the 9/11 attacks—“a presidential order to prepare contingency plans for war in Iraq” emerged, Lang reminds us.
The tight group of advisers who remained in the government had connections to elements inside Iraq or Israel, many of whom harbored agendas that did not match long-term US interests. Vice President Dick Cheney used his own emissaries to strongarm analysts and exploit their ties to the region, and the Pentagon created the Office of Special Plans to examine raw intelligence and create assessments outside the CIA and other established agencies. Over the course of a year, those who might have had contrary views, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell or some experts in the intelligence apparatus, felt growing pressure to support the president. By early 2003, Lang laments, they all had drunk the Kool-Aid.
We can see many parallels in how Trump has conducted the Iran War:
- In the first week of the new Trump administration, in January 2025, Reuters reported that 160 National Security Council staffers were sent home. As these experts were detailed from other parts of the executive branch, such as the State and Defense departments, this affected not only the expertise within the White House but also the interagency process.
- These purges continued throughout 2025, and many who remained on the National Security Council quit. The administration also dramatically reduced foreign embassy staffing and the diplomatic corps.
- As a result, the Associated Press reported three weeks into the Iran War, the State Department had eliminated the Iran office of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, merging it with the Iraq office. The cutting of at least 80 experts in the bureau left “an understaffed government workforce struggling to execute the president’s agenda,” current and former officials told the AP.
- Tulsi Gabbard—the director of national intelligence and a former Democrat so opposed to US-led regime change that she sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts in 2020—tied herself in knots during congressional hearings, trying to testify truthfully while indicating that US agencies did not see Iran as an imminent threat.
While Lang’s article is a rich history of the lead-up to Bush’s war, Middle East Policy did not just give readers a retrospective view of the process that sparked the conflict but also offered incisive analyses long before the invasion of Iraq. Ronald Bleier, in the Winter 2002 issue, wrote that Scott Ritter, one of the main nuclear-weapons inspectors in the 1990s, was sure that the Iraqis not only had no nuclear capability but also no useable chemical or biological agents. Bleier warned that an “agenda of perpetual war meshes seamlessly with suppressing Israel’s ‘enemies,’” and that Bush’s likely decision to deploy 150,000 American troops was “dangerous and provocative…[a] threat to world peace.”
In that December 2002 publication, two months before Powell made the case for invasion, Judith Yaphe proved prescient in her urgent call for planning how to manage postwar Iraq:
The issues are complicated by the competing national interests of Iraq’s neighbors in the composition and character of the successor government and their view of the role they, the United States, and other external powers should and must play in reconstructing Iraq. It will be hard to reconcile their demands for a pacific post-Saddam Iraq with those of Iraqis, who will have their own visions and definitions of life after Saddam and without fear. The national “interests” include conflicting political lifestyles, competing economies based on the same resource or lack thereof—oil—sectarian and tribal enmities, and level of comfort with a prolonged U.S. military presence in the region.
The fact that the US experts who would balance all of these concerns had either been fired, quit, or drunk the Kool-Aid left Iraqis without a nonviolent path to re-establishing order. Trump has reportedly told aides that he wants the Iran War wrapped up in a few weeks; his closest advisers have asserted that the American side will “negotiate with bombs” and that the president will “unleash hell.” The Bush administration had similar hopes for “shock and awe.” The hopes of both presidents did not survive contact with the myriad forces unleashed by their use of violence.
You can find more incisive examinations in The Israel-Iran War, our previous special issue on the 2025 campaign against Iran’s nuclear capacity. And check out the Middle East Policy Council’s website for insights from its analysts.
Middle East Policy, Washington’s War on Iran—special issue
TEHRAN’S PERILOUS POSITION
The June 2025 Israeli War: Iran’s Assessment and Regional Consequences
Ali Bagheri Dolatabadi, 2025
Jordan’s Role in Establishing a Sunni-Israeli Alliance
Ronen Yitzhak, 2026
Iran’s Strategies in Response to Changes in US-China Relations
Sara Bazoobandi, 2024
CAN REGIME CHANGE SUCCEED?
Clerics and Generals: Assessing the Stability of the Iranian Regime
Hadi Sohrabi, 2018
Iran’s Supreme Leader: An Analysis of His Hostility Toward the US and Israel
Thomas Buonomo, 2018
Iran’s Defense Strategy: The Navy, Missiles, and Cyberweaponry
Gawdat Bahgat | Anoushiravan Ehteshami, 2017
Iran and the SCO: The Quest for Legitimacy and Regime Preservation
Nicole Bayat Grajewski, 2023
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC’S SOCIAL & ECONOMIC CRISES
The 2022 Iran Protests: The View from the Streets
Rauf Rahimi | Sajjad Rezaei, 2025
Bargain and Barter: China’s Oil Trade with Iran
Shirzad Azad, 2023
Poverty in Iran: A Critical Analysis
Arvin Khoshnood, 2019
ECHOES OF THE IRAQ INVASION
Invading Iraq: The Road to Perpetual War
Ronald Bleier, 2002
Reinventing Iraq: The Regional Impact of US Military Action
Judith Yaphe, 2002
Drinking the Kool-Aid
W. Patrick Lang, 2004
Coping with Kaleidoscopic Change in the Middle East
Chas W. Freeman Jr., 2013
BOOK REVIEWS
Javad Heiran-Nia, Iran and the Security Order in the Persian Gulf
Reviewed by Mahmood Monshipouri
Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare
Reviewed by Bahram P. Kalviri
Robert J. Lieber, Indispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in a Turbulent World
Reviewed by A.R. Joyce