By David Luhnow
When Peter Mansoor, an ex-U.S. Army colonel who did two long tours in Iraq, considers the unfolding war in Iran, he worries the U.S. risks getting dragged into another long and costly fight in the Middle East.
"It's déjà vu all over again," said Mansoor, who was a brigade commander in Iraq shortly after the 2003 invasion and later a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus. He is now a professor of military history at Ohio State University.
The war is in its fourth week, with the U.S. and Israel using airstrikes to pummel Iran's leadership and military, hobbling the country's ability to project power. The campaign, which the administration initially suggested could take between four to six weeks, could end at any point. The Iranian regime could buckle, President Trump could grow frustrated and walk away, or both sides could de-escalate and claim victory.
Trump has signaled he may be looking for an off-ramp, calling off threatened strikes on Iran's energy facilities this week so that the sides could negotiate. Tehran will have a say in how the conflict ends, however, and Iranian officials are boasting they have the Americans trapped in a quagmire.
Whatever the outcome of the talks, hopes of a military campaign that is both quick and decisive are fading, and there are early warning signs that the Iran war has succumbed to some of the same pitfalls that plagued Iraq and other overseas conflicts, including questions over unclear aims, insufficient planning for contingencies, and overly optimistic assumptions.
Despite the obvious battlefield successes by the U.S. military, the shock-and-awe campaign could easily morph into a less intense, but long-lasting confrontation with a defiant and harder-line Iranian regime that could hold global oil supplies hostage for years to come.
"Even if this ends now, there are going to be very unpredictable long-term consequences, most of which are negative, just like Iraq," said Alan Eyre, a veteran U.S. diplomat who focused on Iran for decades before retiring in 2023.
Every war is different. This conflict is unlikely to be anywhere near as long or costly as Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam. The pressure on Trump to get out of the war will grow -- before it does irreversible damage to the global economy and financial markets, and voters get angry ahead of midterm elections.
But for some, it carries worrisome echoes of all three. Last week, Trump's top counterterrorism official resigned over the war. Joe Kent, a former special operations soldier who completed 11 combat deployments, including in Iraq, said he had supported Trump's promise of not getting involved in "never-ending wars" and felt betrayed.
Trump is the second American president, after Barack Obama, to have built his political brand partly in opposition to the Iraq war, which lasted nearly nine years, cost roughly $2 trillion to $3 trillion and killed about 4,500 American troops. Trump had long vowed to stay out of such wars.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, rejected any comparison. "This is not those wars," he told reporters last week, adding the conflict was focused and decisive.
Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump envoy to the Middle East, told a podcast: "Ask me six months from now, or 12 months from now, if it's a forever war."
Like Iraq, the Iran conflict began, in part, over warnings of an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction, claims that are likely to come under growing scrutiny. Like Iraq, the planning focused heavily on America's spectacular military might, but far less so on the consequences of what might happen next. Like Iraq, experts who may have disagreed were seemingly sidelined or ignored, said Mansoor and Eyre.
"In Iraq, we focused on combat operations which were wildly successful," Mansoor said. "We had very little thought about what would follow the collapse of the Baathist regime."
"In this case we're not even sure if we want the regime to collapse or not, and we sure as heck don't know what the end state of this conflict is," he said.
The administration now finds itself faced with a scenario it says it anticipated but has been accused of not properly preparing for, despite warnings: Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries one-fifth of the world's oil.
Iran's reaction is a classic case of horizontal escalation by an outgunned enemy: Expand the conflict to new battlefields and alter the calculus of a stronger foe, wrote Robert Pape, a military expert at the University of Chicago, in a recent newsletter.
Iran's strategy means the U.S. is now rediscovering another truth from the Iraq war: the so-called Pottery Barn rule of "If you break it, you own it." Just as the U.S. -- having toppled the Iraqi government -- assumed responsibility for trying to prevent a slide into civil war, the Trump administration now faces the task of trying to reopen Hormuz to prevent major global economic damage.
That puts the administration in a bind. It either prolongs the war -- and confronts the choice of whether to put boots on the ground -- or walks away and risks economic disruption, the anger of allies and major damage to America's image and influence. Not to mention a symbolic victory for Tehran, which could wield the threat of blocking the strait in the future to gain concessions and rebuild power.
"If the Iranian regime hangs on, and is able to keep attacking ships, and keep lobbing missiles here and there, the whole Gulf region could become unstable," said Robert Kaplan, an academic at the University of Texas. "Trump could find himself unable to pull out, to say 'the war's over, we won.' He will feel compelled to continue."
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the Trump administration was prepared for any action taken by Iran. "President Trump absolutely expected and planned for the Iranian regime to try to stop the free flow of energy, and he has taken multiple steps to address the issue, like destroying over 30 mine laying vessels," she said. Kelly said she rejects the idea that Trump didn't listen to contrarian voices regarding the operation.
The administration, buoyed by its swift capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, may have wagered that it could easily knock out the Iranian regime or change its behavior, in this case using air power alone. That notion runs counter to the lessons of wars -- from the bombing of North Vietnam to NATO's campaign in Kosovo -- where political outcomes couldn't be achieved solely from the skies.
Miscalculation has often plagued American military ventures, especially in places where the U.S. has less reliable local knowledge, Kaplan said. The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was quick and successful, partly because the U.S. knew the country and region well, he said.
In Vietnam, American policymakers thought they were fighting a war against communist ideology when they were essentially fighting against Vietnamese nationalism, historians have argued. In Iraq, the U.S. misjudged the depth of the country's sectarian divide. In Iran, the current administration has underestimated the resilience of the regime, Kaplan said.
U.S. troops in Iraq believed they would be greeted as liberators because 80% of the population disliked Saddam Hussein's regime, Mansoor said. But the other 20% had a say too and sparked an insurgency and civil war. "It's the same thing for Iran -- and the number who support the regime may be more than 20%," he said.
Jen Gavito, a former longtime State Department official, said Tehran's resilience shouldn't have been a surprise. Virtually every tabletop exercise done by previous presidents showed that trying to remove Iran's leadership would likely end with an even more hard-line regime, she said.
A consequence of some past U.S. wars -- and this one -- has been the unexpected strengthening of U.S. adversaries. The Iraq war strengthened Tehran's hand by removing Hussein -- one of its biggest enemies -- and allowing Iraq to slip into Iran's sphere of influence. The current conflict is shaping up as a win for Russia by boosting oil prices and depleting air-defense stocks that could otherwise have gone to Ukraine.
Gavito said the Trump administration will have to find a way out soon, partly because, unlike Iraq, the administration didn't prepare the American public for a conflict. But Iran also has a say given its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, she added.
Wars are judged by how they end, not how they begin, said Colin Kahl, a former undersecretary of defense from 2021 to 2023. American wars that have started without clear political objectives have rarely ended well, he said.
"When political goals are undefined or contested, the war lacks a logical stopping point," he wrote in a recent essay. "The mission expands, the timeline stretches, and the original rationale fades into the background as the war gains its own momentum."
Since the start of the war, the Trump administration has offered various rationales, from regime change to limiting Iran's capacity to project power.
Kelly, the White House spokeswoman, said Trump's objectives are clear: Destroy Iran's navy and ballistic missile capacity, end its ability to arm militias in the region, and guarantee that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon. She added that, "unlike the years-long foreign entanglements of the past that lacked clear objectives, President Trump remains confident that these goals will be accomplished in swift fashion."
But as with Iraq, the war may produce unintended consequences.
"We're massively denigrating Iran's ability to project power, but exponentially increasing their desire to do so," said Eyre.
As long as the regime in Iran survives, it will feel existentially threatened by the U.S. and Israel and try to rebuild its defenses, Eyre said. "Up until now, I didn't think Iran would seek a nuclear weapon. And now I do."
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 25, 2026 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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