Frederic Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as an intelligence officer in Baghdad, has drawn a direct line between the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the current military campaign against Iran. Both conflicts, he argued, share a core assumption that has proved catastrophic before: that one country is the principal source of the Middle East's afflictions.
Writing in Time, Wehrey said he tracked safe houses and supply routes of Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and lost colleagues to their rockets and roadside bombs. For him and other veterans, "Hvylya" reports, the end of the Iranian regime feels like a welcome reckoning. But the Iraq invasion that brought them into conflict with Tehran "was one of the greatest catastrophes in American foreign policy, and its risks are being repeated now."
The premise of President Donald Trump's war on Iran - that regime change or weakening Tehran's capabilities will fix the region - is mistaken, Wehrey argued. Most drivers of Middle Eastern turmoil are homegrown, rooted in authoritarianism, corruption, and inequality inside Arab states. They are the product of internal failures, not the creation of any external enemy.
For years, Arab leaders used the Iran threat to paper over domestic failures, Wehrey wrote - and Tehran's regional meddling lent the argument just enough credibility to stick.
The war is already feeding instability across the region - from rising fuel prices and choked trade routes to new waves of displacement. Rather than collapsing under strikes, the Islamic Republic is consolidating - absorbing the blows and raising the costs of war for Washington and its partners, while turning the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal chokepoint. The region's structural failures - authoritarianism, corruption, inequality - will go unaddressed, Wehrey concluded, "papered over by the noise and urgency of the conflict."
"Hvylya" previously reported on what JD Vance told Trump behind closed doors about striking Iran.