Mainstream WeeklyWashington needs to negotiate with Iran for the return of peace and stability in the Middle East. It needs to demonstrate a sincere interest towards conceding major waivers and concessions in return for the Iranian willingness to curtail its nuclear and missile programmes. The US has enough to learn from its past mistakes it committed in Iraq, which entangled it in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Vietnam has long been a case that kept warning against American troop engagement in regions far away from its shores. But the US, primarily because of its long-cultivated inability to engage with Iraq, considering it as a Pariah state, repeated the same mistake. President H. W. Bush initially conceived of a strategy of containing Iraq and maintaining a balance of power in the Middle East following the Saddam regime’s takeover of Kuwait and its subsequent liberation by the decisive military victory of the Washington-led war in the Gulf in 1991.
However, he gradually pivoted the US strategy towards deeper entanglement in the Middle East. Much like what the US did in Iran months before and immediately after the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling on the protesters to take over the regime, it had acted in Iraq in a similar fashion during Saddam’s regime. It had inspired popular uprisings in Iraq and called on the dissenters to remove the regime, but did not provide any tangible support on the ground to make it a reality. The Iraqi template guided American inaction in assisting the protesters of Iran in real terms. In Iraq, thousands of Shiite Muslims and Kurds had lost their lives being the primary targets of Saddam’s regime’s ethnic cleansing, and the US could have devised strategies to lend direct support to the survivors but it remained cleft between the imperative to intervene and pursue a strategy of containment, while Vietnam remained a constant reminder with the US to guard against committing troops.
In Iran, the American inability to engage with the regime and reach out to the people propelled it to launch indiscriminate strikes, which hurt the civilians as much as the regime. In the Gulf War, the US had degraded the military capabilities of Iraq but did not take the opportunity to remove the regime for fear of a quagmire. It also did not engage with Saddam’s regime, condemning it as a Pariah state. Throughout the 1990s, irrespective of changes in administrations, the US could not completely abandon the idea of regime change in Iraq, and it kept flirting with the idea by pursuing a non-negotiable approach with Iraq. The US remained too stubborn to reconcile with the Saddam regime. For instance, the Bush administration did not provide any incentives to Saddam’s regime, even while it complied with UN inspections following a ceasefire agreement after Operation Desert Storm. Even as the regime amassed weapons of mass destruction, it reportedly destroyed them in fear of international exposure.
The US tried to avert messy troop entanglements in Iraq and expected the fall of the Saddam regime through external pressures, but that did not happen, and soon it fell into that trap. The strategies of containing Saddam by establishing no-fly zones first in northern and then in southern Iraq, along with the entrenchment of military bases around the Middle East, made the American involvement more complex in the evolving geopolitics. President Bill Clinton overtly moved from a strategy of containing Iraq to that of regime change who firmly believed there could be no end to sanctions as long as Saddam remained in power. Like his predecessor, he rejected the idea of offering Iraq a chance of reconciliation. However, isolation of Iraq through sanctions had massive impacts on civilians who failed to meet their basic needs, including food and medicines, whereas the regime remained mostly insulated from the impacts. American military entrenchment in the Middle East invigorated the role of militant groups such as Al Qaeda, which abhorred the massive US military presence in the region. However, President Clinton did not budge from a hawkish disposition and wanted Iraq to completely dismantle its nuclear programme and he refused to negotiate even as Iraq was complying the US demands. President George W. Bush, took the ultimate step to directly move troops into Iraq, a blunder that still haunts the US through its defiance to stabilize and serve as a fertile ground for radical groups although it continued to impose a heavy cost on the US both in terms of human and material resources. As many US allies did not view Iraq as an imminent threat, they began to distance themselves from the US military campaign against Iraq.
Isolation of Iran as a Pariah State
The US policies to isolate Iran from global supply chains forced it to cultivate non-state actors and pursue a shadow economy, not just for survival but to impose costs on its adversaries- the US and Israel. It spawned a strategy of mine warfare and irregular fighters, evolving into an asymmetric war doctrine which facilitated use of proxies from different theatres for maintaining a course of deniability.
Through the IRGC, Iran built Hezbollah and nurtured Shiite militias in Iraq, mastering tactics like roadside bombings and covert targeting. Syria’s civil war became a testing ground for these proxies. A decentralised logistics network now spans Iraq and Syria, enabling Iran’s costly retaliation. The doctrine of absorbing strikes, dispersing, and reconstituting has made the recent war in the Middle East prohibitively expensive for adversaries.
Iran’s decades-long isolation from the global financial system, frozen assets, and exclusion from the petrodollar system have left it with little to lose. This precarious position emboldened Iran to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz and target key infrastructure, effectively holding the global economy hostage. With its own economic interests already compromised, Iran saw no deterrent in jeopardising regional stability. The US President Barack Obama