The strategy meant to keep Saddam Hussein boxed in without another war turned the United States into the Persian Gulf's permanent police force - and produced a backlash Washington never anticipated. Two scholars say the same dynamic now threatens to unfold with Iran.

According to Foreign Affairs contributors Daniel Chardell and Samuel Helfont, the post-1991 containment of Iraq transformed a minimal U.S. naval presence into "an archipelago of permanent military bases" across Arab states, "Hvylya" reports. Washington reestablished the Navy's Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, built Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, expanded facilities in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and sustained near-continuous aircraft carrier deployments.

The expanding military footprint created problems of its own. Perhaps the best known was al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad against the United States in 1996 - driven in part by the American presence on Saudi soil. But he was hardly alone. By the mid-1990s, sanctions were devastating Iraqi society while Saddam and his inner circle lived in gilded palaces. President George H. W. Bush had pledged in August 1990: "Half a century ago, the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. I pledge to you: we will not make that mistake again." The ensuing containment policy, the scholars argue, proved far costlier than the war itself.

Allied support crumbled. In 1996, Saudi Arabia and Turkey refused to let Washington launch bombings of Iraq from their territory. France withdrew from the no-fly zone coalition. When the United States and Britain struck Iraq for four days in 1998 - Operation Desert Fox - protests erupted across Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere. Moscow recalled its ambassadors from Washington and London for the first time since World War II.

"A prolonged campaign to contain Iran after this war would lay bare the limits of U.S. power in an era increasingly defined by the capacity of its friends and foes to challenge it," Chardell and Helfont write. Unlike in 1991, the United States no longer commands unipolar supremacy - making the political costs of indefinite containment steeper than anything Bush or Clinton faced.

Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on how every Tomahawk fired at Iran weakens American deterrence elsewhere.