The cease-fire between the United States, Israel, and Iran announced on April 7 will most likely leave the Islamic Republic weakened but intact. That is precisely the outcome that produced a 12-year trap after the 1991 Gulf War - and two scholars say Washington is walking the same path again.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Chardell, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, and Samuel Helfont, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, trace a direct line from Operation Desert Storm to today's Iran, "Hvylya" reports.
In 1991, the United States destroyed Saddam Hussein's army but left his regime in place. President George H. W. Bush went so far as to call on the Iraqi people to "take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." When they did, U.S. forces stood by as Iraqi security services slaughtered an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Shiites and around 20,000 Kurds. Washington then improvised a series of no-fly zones meant to be temporary - they became permanent.
The result was a tenuous status quo that required constant enforcement, periodic escalation, and a sustained military presence. "The problem was not the battlefield outcome but the failure to align policy and strategy," Chardell and Helfont write. Between 1991 and 2003, no U.S. president was willing to live with Saddam's regime, but none had a viable plan to remove him either. "What had begun as an effort to avoid deeper U.S. involvement in Iraq instead entrenched it," the scholars observe.
U.S. officials have now abandoned talk of overthrowing the Islamic Republic, a shift formalized in the cease-fire terms. If Washington follows the post-1991 script - containing Iran without offering a path to normalization - it risks the same cycle of escalation, allied alienation, and eventual war that consumed American foreign policy for over a decade.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how Iran's proxy network turned from a strategic shield into a fatal liability.