Mark Twain is often reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” —and when it comes to American presidents declaring victory in the Middle East, the couplets are becoming embarrassingly predictable.
We are witnessing the latest verse in this sorry saga: Donald Trump, airborne aboard Air Force One, declaring that Iran has been “essentially defeated” even as Israeli citizens scramble for shelters and Iranian missiles fly.
The spectacle is a grotesque echo of another president’s airborne theater, and the similarities should chill every American to the bone.
Twenty-three years ago, George W. Bush donned a flight suit, landed tailhook-style on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and stood beneath a banner that would become an epitaph for his presidency’s credibility: “Mission Accomplished.”
At that moment, 139 Americans had died in Iraq. By the time the United States finally staggered out of that country, another 3,424 Americans had been killed, and the war had cost over $3 trillion. The insurgency Bush assured us was in its “last throes” had barely begun. The banner was not merely premature; it was a monument to catastrophic self-delusion.
Now we have Trump’s airborne press conference, a venue apparently conducive to grand pronouncements disconnected from ground truth.
“Militarily, we’ve essentially—as far as I’m concerned—we’ve essentially defeated Iran,” Trump told reporters. “I guess they can have a little bit of a fight back, but not much.”
This is the same man who, when asked if he would declare the conflict over, replied, “No reason to. I think I’d just say they’re decimated.”
But here is the inconvenient reality that keeps intruding on these presidential fantasies: as Trump was delivering his verdict of Iranian defeat, the Islamic Republic was busy launching retaliatory strikes.
The regime’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was categorical in his rejection of Trump’s narrative: “No, we never asked for a cease-fire, and we have never asked even for negotiation. We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes.”
This is not the language of a “decimated” adversary preparing to capitulate. It is the language of an enemy that has watched American presidents declare victory before—and watched American troops bleed out afterward.
The parallels between 2003 and 2026 are not merely poetic; they are structural. Both wars were launched with overlapping justifications: eliminating weapons of mass destruction, promoting regime change, and demonstrating American resolve.
Both were preceded by the removal of a neighboring regime (the Taliban in Afghanistan before Iraq, the Assad government’s erosion before Iran). And both featured an American president utterly incapable of resisting the allure of the heroic self-portrait.
Yet the differences are perhaps more disturbing. In 2003, the Bush administration at least went through the motions of building a coalition, seeking UN legitimacy, and constructing a public case for war over many months.
Today’s conflict appears to be improvisational theater with live ammunition.
Senator Chris Murphy, after receiving a classified briefing on the Iran war plans, emerged to describe them as “incoherent and incomplete.”
His account of administration officials being stumped by basic questions is devastating: “The question that stumped them: what happens when you stop bombing and they restart production? They hinted at more bombing. Which is, of course, forever war.”
“Forever war.” The phrase was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a strategic blueprint.
Trump’s own advisors are reportedly experiencing “buyer’s remorse,” with one source telling Axios that the president was “high on his own supply”—encouraged by recent military successes and convinced he could topple the Iranian regime without ground troops.
The administration initially anticipated a four-to-six-week operation. Officials are now preparing for a crisis that could extend until September, with U.S. involvement continuing in some form indefinitely.
This is the pattern, you see. The initial strikes are always stunningly successful. The air power is always overwhelming. The enemy is always on its heels. And then something mysterious happens: they keep fighting.
They adapt. They insurge. They wait. Saddam Hussein’s statue fell in April 2003, and by summer’s end, the insurgency that would consume thousands of American lives was gathering force.
The “Mission Accomplished” banner was not just a piece of cloth; it was an invitation to every adversary in the region to prove the Americans wrong.
Trump’s version of the banner is rhetorical rather than physical, but it hangs just as prominently. “Militarily, we’ve essentially defeated Iran.”
What can that possibly mean when Iranian missiles are still flying, when the regime continues to function, when the Strait of Hormuz—through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes—remains contested?
It means nothing, or it means what it always means: a president who needs the American people to believe that the hard part is over so that he can move on to the next rally, the next tweet, the next fantasy of his own infallibility.
Maybe it just means that the president is completely out of touch, a pathological liar, or someone too stupid to appreciate facts that are obvious to everyone else.
The BBC’s security correspondent, reflecting on the shadow Iraq casts over this conflict, observed that “the consequences of this war will echo for years, and US national security may ultimately be weakened by it.”
This is the cruelest irony.
Wars launched to demonstrate American strength so often end up demonstrating American limitations.
Iran is the mess it is today because the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected, secular Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to protect oil interests.
The U.S. intervened in domestic politics to support a corrupt dictator in Vietnam, losing a long and bloody war rather than using democratic methods to blunt Soviet influence.
Cuba survived US interventions throughout the early 20th century, including the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro.
Daniel Ortega rules in Nicaragua today despite President Ronald Reagan’s illegal support for the right-wing Contra terrorists who waged a guerrilla war against the Sandinista government.
Bush unleashed decades of chaos in Iraq after he ordered the invasion to remove Saddam Hussein.
Bush Republicans also set up the United States to lose its longest war, when Trump surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban in February 2020.
Regimes we seek to topple sometimes fall, but what rises in their place is rarely what we ordered. That is a lesson learned by Democratic presidents that was lost on Reagan, Bush, and Trump.
Iran’s influence in the region, contrary to Trump’s claims of “decimation,” may well expand as it did after Saddam’s removal.
There is a particular pathology at work here—a compulsion among American presidents to declare victory before the victory is won, to pose in heroic postures while the real war is still being fought by soldiers who do not get banners or press conferences.
Bush at least had the grace, years later, to admit his mistake. “Clearly, putting ‘Mission Accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake,” he said in 2009. The admission came after 3,400 more Americans had died, but it came.
Will we be waiting years for a similar acknowledgment from Trump? Or will he simply move on to the next conflict, the next declaration of imminent triumph, the next promise that this time—this time—the enemy is really, truly, essentially defeated?
In the meantime, Israelis run for shelter. Fourteen American service members are already dead. The Strait of Hormuz grows more dangerous by the day.
And a draft-dodging president who has never been a planner, whose approach to strategy is improvisational at best, tells us from the comfort of Air Force One that it is all essentially over.
We have seen this movie before. We know how it ends. The tragedy is that we keep buying tickets.
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