Name: US-Israel war with Iran: Will Trump learn from past wars? | The Global Story
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:38:03.000Z
Duration: 26 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.

Basic passive voice

After Afghanistan and then Iraq and then Libya, Donald Trump was supposed to be the anti forever wars candidate.

We were having negotiations with these lunatics and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.

They were going to attack if we didn't do it.

What lessons, if any, has the United States drawn from its recent past?

We will act with the full power of the United States military.

We will act with allies at our side and we will prevail.

From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman in London and welcome to the global story on YouTube.

I am a security analyst for the BBC, a long time previously a security correspondent for the BBC.

We wanted to speak with you today about the possible comparisons between what is happening in Iran now and various different US Military interventions in the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions over the last few decades, trying to understand what lessons, if any, have been learned.

Let's start with Iraq, which is an example, a comparison that a lot of people are making right now.

You've done a lot of reporting, in depth reporting on this period of recent US History, particularly on the case that was made for the Iraq war and the buildup to it.

What are the similarities and differences between Iraq 2003 and Iran 2026?

And the shadow of Iraq is hanging over what the US Is doing in Iran now.

And you can hear that explicitly referred to and brought up time and time again, including by Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, secretary of defense, talking about this isn't going to be like Iraq.

Our generation knows better and so does this president.

So you can see the framing of it is very much about what are supposed to be the differences.

There are differences, it's worth saying.

I mean, one of the differences is that the Iraq war had an enormous build up and a very explicit attempt to build a case for what was going to be regime change.

Now, that case ended up being settled on weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons and to stop all support for terrorist groups.

The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations, the possession of these by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons and missiles.

I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously.

And it was a very explicit decision that even though the fundamental drive in Washington was just for regime change to remove Saddam for all kinds of reasons, they needed a justification for it.

They felt both for public opinion domestically and internationally, including in the un, in the Security Council.

So great effort was placed in the US and also the UK in, in building that justification for war over months and going through diplomatic, international processes, trying to get weapons inspectors in, going through UN resolutions.

But that was very different from what we've seen with Iran this time in which there's been almost no build up, there's been almost no attempt to make the case.

And when it has been made just in the last few days, around the time that the war in Iran started, it's been quite chaotic and haphazard.

You can see echoes of some of the justification in the way the US has talked about imminent threats, potentially missile programs being reconstituted which could reach the U.S. nuclear enrichment.

But no one has felt that that was quite made in the same way as Iraq.

When you hear some of these justifications which have been laid out by the Trump administration In the last 10 days or so, do you have a feeling of bells being rung and uncanniness to it?

Well, what's odd is it's, it's a very faint echo of Iraq.

If they're ringing the bell, they're not doing it very hard because they, you saw them in the, in the period around the start of this war, the Iran war, reaching for some of those justifications which had echoes of Iraq.

So you saw, for instance, Steve Wyckoff at one point say, well, Iran is potentially very close to a large amount of nuclear enriched material.

They're probably a week away from having industrial, industrial grade bomb making material.

You had talk about the missile capability and Donald Trump referring to missiles which could potentially reach the United States.

They've already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas and they're working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America, but actually no real evidence that that was close.

And when you go back to Iraq, they'd spent quite a bit of time building up dossier's intelligence estimates to justify that kind of language.

This time it felt like they were just quickly reaching round for some of those comparisons, but actually without really having built them or thought through or made them convincing, because pretty quickly they were disposed of, actually you'd see them reach for one justification.

We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.

We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.

And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and then effectively ditch it quite soon for another.

Mr. President, did Israel forced your hand to launch these strikes against Iran?

Did anyone pull the United States into this war?

You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first.

And wavering between this talk of whether it's regime change or degrading the Iranian military as the real reason for it happening, what was the actual process that George W. Bush and his administration went through in 2003 to make that case?

What were the main things that they had to hit and how did they do it?

Well, what's interesting is it wasn't 2003.

This was an extended period from when George W. Bush famously described an axis of evil, including, it had to be said, Iran.

And at the time, many, you know, the talk in Washington was Iraq first, then Iran.

But Iraq went so badly they never, you know, that never happened.

But they started to build that case for a year, effectively a year of building the case for war and of putting in place the pieces to do it.

Putting in place the case of, of weapons of mass destruction, once they'd fixed on that as the best justification.

And the UN process and all of that concurrent with a large scale military build up, not just the air and navy that we've seen in this Iran war, so very different in many ways.

Well, that preparatory phase in terms of public opinion, where did it get them, the George W. Bush administration?

How much public support was there for war when the moment eventually came?

And I mean, it's interesting because when you talk to people now, everyone was like, I was always against it, but actually at the time, you know, public opinion in the UK was roughly split down the middle and in the US largely in favour.

It was post 9 11, post the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, which had killed 3,000.

This was a United States still reeling from that.

And we know that after September 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated.

And that also has a transformative impact on public opinion.

And so public opinion was, if you like, more willing to go along with these national security considerations in those days.

Well, I remember vividly in 2003, particularly the kind of the drumbeat of patriotism in some sectors of US Society that was that built up behind the Iraq war.

You remember, you know, the French vetoed the UN Resolution in New York.

No French fries were going to be freedom fries, instead were going to be served in the canteen.

And there was the revival of the Bart Simpson moniker for French people as cheese eating surrender monkeys.

I mean, what is public opinion showing right now from what you've seen far a divided US, A US which is more opposed to this conflict with Iran than is supportive of it.

And of course, but a polarized US With Republicans, supporters of Donald Trump far more likely to back this policy.

I think politics does play a role in this because you've got the midterms coming up and those calculations that will be going on in Washington and in the White House will be partly about how long can you sustain a war where you don't have large scale public support, where you haven't made the case and where you potentially have economic impact from things like rising oil prices, gas prices at the pump in the US that is going to, you know, that's part of the equation, I think, and again, different from 2003.

But I think the other comparison which is correct, I think between Iran and Iraq is the question of is there a plan for what to do?

Because the great failure with Iraq was there was no plan.

It's extraordinary looking back, how they had put all this effort into the build up to the war, the justification for the war, the execution militarily of the war, but almost nothing about what would happen afterwards, you know, disastrous, I mean, absolutely disastrous.

Some terrible decisions in the aftermath where the parallel opens up now is, is there a plan?

Because in the run up to Iraq they'd actually, you know, the State Department had done lots of planning and it just got junked.

This time I don't think there has been any planning.

And you can see that when you hear President Trump and other administration officials talk because they will say things at some points like, well, popular uprising would be great.

When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take.

Other points they go, well, maybe we can go for the Venezuela option, which is to have a effectively a leadership change, the Delsey Rodriguez option, you know, who was Nicolas Maduro's deputy, who suddenly takes over, but basically the rest of the regime remains in place.

But also you have talk about, well, Maybe we don't get regime change.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

US-Israel war with Iran: Will Trump learn from past wars? | The Global Story

significant

period

basically

potentially