Iran: Why This Isn't Iraq

Much of the current media coverage, from both left and right, has framed the situation in Iran as a kind of neocon repeat: Trump walking back his promises, America lurching towards another Middle Eastern misadventure. The rhetoric hasn't helped. Talk of liberating the Iranian people, of imminent threats to the United States. It does echo the run-up to Iraq, and critics are not entirely wrong to notice that.

But I think the comparison, while superficially compelling, obscures more than it reveals. Let me explain why.

The Persian Exception

The first thing to establish is that Iran is not an Arab country. The Iranians are not Arabs. This matters more than most Western commentators acknowledge, because the lazy post-Iraq assumption, that any attempt to reshape a Middle Eastern state will end in ISIS, civil war, and the collapse of order, is derived almost entirely from experience with Arab societies. The Arab Spring taught us, or should have taught us, that the West's naive assumption that the natural endpoint for these countries is liberal democracy was exactly that: naive. Remove a strongman, and you don't get Jefferson; you get chaos.

But Persia is a different civilisational case. Iran has a deep and distinctive national identity, a pre-Islamic history of which its people are genuinely proud, and a political tradition that long predates the revolution. More importantly, the Islamic Republic itself was not the organic endpoint of the Persian people. The clerics saw a power vacuum created by the fall of the Shah and capitalised on it, exploiting legitimate popular anger at the corruption and forced Westernisation of the Pahlavi regime to seize control of a revolutionary moment that was never really theirs. There is a credible alternative in the country's own recent history: the monarchy, whatever its faults, was not the Islamic Republic. And the level of repression required to sustain the current regime, most visible in the brutal suppression of protest movements particularly since the death of Mahsa Amini, suggests a government that does not rest on genuine popular consent.

I am not going to claim expertise on precisely what the Iranian people want. Whether it is the return of the Crown Prince, some form of republic, or something else entirely, that is a harder question than most commentators admit, and I would be cautious of anyone who answers it with confidence from the outside. What I will say is this: from a purely geopolitical standpoint, almost any alternative to the current regime is preferable to the West. An Iran that is not structurally organised around hostility to Western interests, that is not exporting Islamic extremism across the region, and that participates in the international order rather than waging covert war against it. That is the objective, whatever its internal political form. The conditions here are meaningfully different from Iraq or Afghanistan, and that matters.

The Enemy Question

There is another crucial distinction that gets lost in the Iraq comparison, and I want to be direct about it.

Consider what the Iranian regime has actually done. Since 1979 it has been directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of American and British personnel, primarily through its proxy networks and material support for militia groups across Iraq, Afghanistan, and the wider region. It has conducted terrorist attacks on British sovereign territory. It has run sustained information warfare and psychological operations against Western interests for decades. It has, as we are now seeing, attacked British sovereign territory in Cyprus and targeted our allies in the Gulf. Look at that record clearly, and there is really only one word for what the Iranian regime is in relation to Britain and the West: an enemy. Not a rival, not a difficult partner. An enemy, in the plainest sense.

We did not choose this conflict. But it was chosen for us, decades ago. The question was never whether Iran was a threat. It was only how seriously we were willing to take that threat.

This is not what Iraq was. Whatever the intelligence failures and political manipulations that preceded the 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not operationally at war with Britain in the way Iran has been for forty-five years.

Geography and the Limits of Force

Here the critics do have a point worth taking seriously, just not the one they think they're making.

Iran is, as I have argued elsewhere, one of the world's great natural fortresses. The distances are vast, the terrain formidable, and the logistical challenge of any conventional ground campaign would be extraordinary. Iraq and Afghanistan were expeditionary wars: boots on the ground, physical occupation, and an attempt to govern and reconstruct societies from scratch. That was the mistake. And it is clearly not what is happening in Iran.

There are no boots on the ground. Nobody serious is proposing to occupy Tehran. The comparison to Iraq therefore fails at its most fundamental level. The model of intervention is entirely different.

But the geography also constrains what air power and strikes alone can achieve. Whether the current American and Israeli approach, sustained bombardment of regime infrastructure and nuclear facilities, will produce the desired result, which I assume is regime change or at minimum strategic incapacitation, remains genuinely uncertain. I am sceptical. Bombing a regime rarely causes it to collapse from within; it can just as easily consolidate national sentiment around the government. We have to wait and see, but my scepticism is on record.

The Right Strategy

If regime change is the objective, and I think a reasonable case can be made that it should be, then the most credible path is not shock and awe, but sustained, patient pressure designed to create the conditions for internal collapse.

It is worth saying, for the record, that this strategy was beginning to work. By 2019-20, maximum pressure sanctions had collapsed the currency, slashed oil revenues, and forced subsidy cuts that triggered serious domestic unrest. It was abandoned before it reached a tipping point. That is now largely academic, because the bombing has started and the strategic moment has moved on. But the logic was sound, and the inconsistency of its application was the failure, not the approach itself.

That means sustained sanctions, targeted assassinations of military and nuclear leadership, cyber operations against critical infrastructure, and support for internal dissent, applied consistently and in combination, not episodically.

The logic is straightforward: you are not trying to defeat Iran militarily. You are trying to chip away at the regime's legitimacy and capacity until a tipping point is reached from within. This takes time. It requires patience and consistency of purpose across multiple administrations. But given the geography, and given the history, I cannot see another realistic path to a different Iran.

The Wider Board

Two wider geopolitical points are worth noting, because they tend to get overlooked in coverage focused on the immediate military picture.

First, China. A weakened or destabilised Iranian regime is bad for Beijing. Iran has served as a useful distraction and drain on American attention and resources in the Middle East. If the United States effectively neutralises the Iranian threat, it frees itself to concentrate on the Pacific, which is where the real strategic competition lies. From China's perspective, a chaotic but functioning Iran is considerably preferable to an Iran that is no longer a problem for Washington.

Second, Russia. The Ukrainian front has been substantially sustained by Iranian drone technology. The Shahed series has been central to Russian strike operations throughout the war. Degrade Iran, and you degrade Russia's air campaign in Ukraine. The two theatres are more directly connected than most analysis acknowledges.

Britain's Position

I want to conclude with something closer to home, and the bridge from the Iran analysis to the British question is Cyprus, because it makes the strategic stakes concrete.

When Iranian forces attacked the British Sovereign Base Area in Cyprus, they were not simply striking a military installation. They were testing a proposition: will Britain defend what is hers? The answer, so far, has been ambiguous at best. By all accounts, managing the attack required French and Greek assistance. The Cypriot government has reportedly lodged a formal complaint. Not hard to understand, given that the entire basis of Britain's presence there rests on an implicit guarantee of protection and stability. A warship has been dispatched. It is reportedly at least a week away.

This matters beyond the embarrassment of it. Our credibility in influencing American policy on Iran, our ability to be heard in Washington as anything other than a passive observer, depends on Britain being seen as a country that acts in its own interests and stands by its commitments. Every signal of weakness or ambiguity makes that harder. And right now we are sending quite a few of those signals.

We have been a credible and consequential ally to the United States for the better part of a century. That relationship has never been one of equals. It has always required us to bring something to the table: experience, intelligence, institutional knowledge, and above all reliable commitment. When Britain's word meant something, we could influence American policy in ways that smaller powers cannot. We could bring centuries of hard-won understanding of how the world actually works to an ally that, whatever its extraordinary power, is still a young country in historical terms.

That credibility is now visibly eroding. The Chagos Islands decision, conducted in a manner that most people cannot understand, handed a strategic asset to a government with no obvious alignment with our interests. The response to the present conflict has been defensive language delivered through gritted teeth, the impression of a government whose hands are tied by domestic political pressures rather than strategic calculation. The government knows it cannot do nothing. But it is more afraid of its own far left than it is of Iran.

This is the accumulation of decisions that compounds into a strategic problem. Chagos. Cyprus. A general pattern of ambiguity about where our interests lie and what we are prepared to defend. Adversaries notice these things. When Britain signals that it is unable or unwilling to hold what it has, the risk is that others begin to test the proposition, and that we start losing things that actually matter.

We do not need to be America. We cannot be America. But we need to be Britain: a country that knows its allies, knows its enemies, understands its interests, and has the capacity and the will to act on all three. At the moment, I am not sure we are that country. And I think we should be asking ourselves, with some urgency, how we get back to being it.