Israel’s Clash With Iran Is Nothing Like the Iraq War

Remember when Saddam Hussein sponsored an army of fascists that invaded the United States and raped and murdered thousands of Americans? And when he funded a gang of religious fanatics to fire thousands of rockets at people in Leeds and Manchester here in the UK? And when he himself pressed the button on ballistic missiles that landed on New York City and London? No, me neither. Which makes it perplexing that Israel’s push against Iran is being compared to the Iraq War of 2003 – for Iran has done all of that to the Jewish nation, and it dreams of doing more.

The debate about Israel / Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. Gaslighting swirls all around it. This is a crazed stab at ‘regime change’, cry Israel’s critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from ‘regime change’. It is an ‘illegal war’ and a ‘war of aggression’, insists the left. And the trump card: it’s Iraq all over again. Both the digital right and digital left are ‘invoking the spectre of Iraq’, in the words of the New York Times. ‘Welcome to Iraq 2.0’, says the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Only worse – Israel’s ‘unprovoked attack’ on Iran has the potential to be ‘far, far more catastrophic’, apparently.

The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.

The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.