As Trump weighs bombing Iran's Fordow, 'mission creep' lurks behind US attack
US President Donald Trump believes he is only weighing military strikes on Iran's Fordow nuclear plant, but the history of Middle East "mission creep" lurks behind his deliberations.
Mission creep is when a military campaign's objectives start to shift and devolve into a longer, unforeseen commitment, and has often characterised US military adventures around the world.
"If the US does join the war in Iran - and right now I think it won't - it will go in planning only to do some limited bombing. But as we all know, once you're in a war, there can be a lot of surprises. It is much easier to get into a war than to get out of one,' Tom E Ricks, the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, told Middle East Eye.
On Thursday evening, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump approved a US attack plan on Iran but is waiting to see if he can get Iran to renounce its nuclear programme. The New York Times also followed that with a report saying Iran was willing to accept Trump's offer to meet.
But history shows that the US may struggle to stop at Fordow, even if Trump wants to. His deliberation on whether to attack Iran is being compared to the 2003 decision to invade Iraq, but that might be a false comparison.
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The story of the US's involvement in Iraq is one of incremental involvement.
In 1991, the US implemented a no-fly zone to protect Iraq's Kurdish minority. Then, in 1998, the US and UK launched widespread strikes on Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein failed to allow weapons inspectors access to his country. The decision to invade fully came in 2003 after the US falsely claimed the country had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda militant group.
Even then, experts say there are key differences from now.
Although Israel lobbied the US for many years to invade Iraq, that war was US-led.
US joins 'Israel-led war'
Now, Trump is on the cusp of joining Israel in what is the zenith of its long campaign to rewrite the balance of power in the Middle East since the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.
That attack set off a region-wide war with Israeli ground troops occupying the Gaza Strip. Israel degraded Hezbollah in Lebanon and has repeatedly launched strikes in Syria, both while Bashar al-Assad's government was in power there and after his overthrow in December 2024.
'Iraq was a US war,' Paul Salem, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told MEE. 'What we have seen since 7 October [2023] is something different; Israeli-led and designed wars with Israeli objectives and the US coming along.'
If Trump does launch strikes on Iran, he will do so under justifications that echo 2003, but it's still not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Then, the US falsely claimed that Iraq's Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.
But there are key differences now.
'What makes this precipice of intervention unique is that the US was engaged in direct negotiations with Iran,' Fawaz Gerges, author of What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East, told MEE.
'What makes this precipice of intervention unique is that the US was engaged in direct negotiations with Iran'
- Fawaz Gerges, academic and author
Indeed, just before the Israeli attack, Iran and the US were set to meet in Oman for the sixth round of nuclear talks aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear programme. And the reality is that this agreement would just be a follow-up deal to the nuclear deal that Iran and the US signed during President Barack Obama's tenure, which Trump unilaterally exited from during his first tenure.
However, in 2003, Hussein ultimately rejected requests for inspectors to enter Iraq. The Bush administration then used false intelligence to justify its attack.
Trump's own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said in March that Iran was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon.
Trump disregarded her assessment. 'I don't care what she said,' Trump said on Tuesday about the assessment. 'I think they were very close to having a weapon.'
As of Thursday, Trump was still vacillating between striking Iran and appearing to use Israel's pummelling of the Islamic Republic as a negotiating card to achieve what he says his aim is - Iran renouncing all enrichment of uranium.
"I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I'm going to do," Trump said in the Oval Office. He earlier called for Iran's 'unconditional surrender'.
Arab officials whose countries have been trying to mediate between Iran and the US told MEE earlier that they believe Trump is more likely than not to order US strikes on Iran.
The expected target of American strikes is Fordow, the Iranian enrichment facility buried half a kilometre underground. Israel needs the US's 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs and B-2 aircraft to have a chance at destroying the plant through conventional strikes.
Mission creep
The US has conducted limited bombing campaigns elsewhere in the Middle East, but has rarely avoided being drawn into a deeper commitment.
One example where it did so was 1986 in Libya, when the Reagan administration bombed Muammar Gaddafi's regime in retaliation for the bombing of a disco in West Berlin that killed two US service members.
Ethan Chorin, a former US diplomat and author, said the closest parallel to today is the Obama administration's 2011 decision to lead a Nato bombing campaign on Libya during the Arab Spring.
'Initially, US intervention in Libya was ostensibly to protect civilians in Benghazi,' Chorin said, author of Exit the Colonel: The Hidden History of the Libyan Revolution.
But Chorin said the comparisons stop there.
'Libya was seen as a 'safer bet' for intervention during the Arab Spring. No one thinks Iran is marginal. There is a big difference. But the concern about mission creep is there.'
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'Assume you destroy Fordow and have an agitated regime that is still in power. What lessons will they (the regime) have learned?' he added.
The Trump administration has not stated that its goal is regime change in Iran, but Trump didn't rule it out, saying on Truth Social that the US knows where he is but has decided not to take him out, "at least not for now".
But Israel has made no secret that a positive outcome for them of the attacks on Iran's senior chain of command, energy infrastructure and military capabilities could collapse the government.
'It could certainly be the result, because Iran is very weak,' Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News on Monday. 'The decision to act, to rise up, at this time, is the decision of the Iranian people.'
If Trump does enter the war with Israel, suggesting its goals are regime change, it would be a major pivot for a US president who visited the Gulf in May and excoriated 'interventionists' and 'nation-builders'.
Libya, a predominantly Sunni Muslim country of just seven million people, is a bad comparison. The spark for the protests against Gaddafi was organic, coming as part of the wider Arab Spring movement. It then descended into a civil war, fuelled in part by Gulf states backing rival militias.
Even Iraq, where the US carried out De-Ba'athification after ousting Hussein's secular government, does not compare to Iran, Gerges told MEE.
'There is a delusion of raw power here,' he told MEE.
'The objectives have changed, but here the goal seems to be to destroy as much as possible in the military infrastructure and see if, as a side effect, you bring about regime change or just chaos.'
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