The War on Terror Never Ended. Now It’s Spreading to Iran.

Two decades of foreign policy failure have led us to the brink of another catastrophic war in the Middle East.

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The war on terror never ended. It simply evolved into a series of forever wars humming in the background. With never-ending conflict in the Middle East normalized, it’s all too easy to stumble into a new Middle East war.

Over the past week, President Donald Trump has waffled on whether America would directly join Israel’s bombing of Iran, which may soon include commando raids and even ground forces. He gave an amber light to Netanyahu’s belligerence—neither encouraging nor discouraging him to begin bombing the country to halt its nuclear program, even though US intelligence contradicted Israeli intelligence that suggested an Iranian nuke was imminent. When those initial strikes proved successful, Trump began providing some support. 

As the US slowly inched toward entering the war more directly, memes of Trump’s and George W. Bush’s faces blended together began appearing on social media, and soon all of the discredited excuses for regime change that led to America’s invasion of Iraq resurfaced: They’ll greet us as liberators, weapons of mass destruction must be eliminated, Mission Accomplished won’t be far off. Although Trump had run for president in 2016 and 2024 as an antiwar candidate and has often expressed skepticism toward endless US military engagements in the Middle East, this week has revealed that we’re still living in George W. Bush’s world. And not just symbolically. So many aspects of W’s regime-change wars and the broader war on terror remain in place that it’s all too easy to drum up momentum for an entirely new season of the franchise in Iran.

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Read more of Jonathan’s article in The New Republic

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