The bombing of Iran’s revolutionary government is prompting comparisons with Iraq, but ramesh ponnuru says they are the wrong ones. The war to watch is not the one that bogged down the United States after 2003. It is the strike Israel carried out in 1981 against Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
That distinction matters because the 1981 attack was aimed at a nuclear site, not a countrywide occupation. France sold a nuclear reactor to Iraq in 1976 under Jacques Chirac’s government, and the French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. After Saddam Hussein took power, he poured resources into Osirak and was close to his dream of an Arab bomb by 1981. On 7 June 1981, Israel deployed eight F-16s to destroy the reactor. The jets struck during mealtime, when the anti-aircraft positions were unmanned, and the reactor was destroyed in under two minutes.
The reaction was immediate and hostile. The United Nations convened for a number of sessions to condemn the Israeli action, and even the American government of the day condemned it. But the strategic judgment changed as the years passed. After Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the article says a nuclear weapon would have changed the region’s war calculus and likely deterred an international force from pushing Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The American defense secretary later told the Israelis after Kuwait’s liberation that taking out Osirak had made the job easier in Desert Storm.
That is why the Iraq analogy now circulating in parts of America is, in the article’s view, badly chosen. The claim that the United States could get bogged down in Iran the way it did in Iraq after 2003 reflects a broader fatigue with foreign interventions, but it is a different fear from the one that shaped the Osirak debate. For a period, that anti-war sentiment dominated only on the American left. During Barack Obama’s time, Democrats worried about getting into boots-on-the-ground situations in Syria and elsewhere. Donald Trump then broke Republican respect for interventionists, attacked George W. Bush and John McCain, and made opposition to stupid wars in the Middle East a large part of his platform.
The argument now is not about whether Iran is Iraq. It is about whether a limited strike is being mistaken for the kind of open-ended war Washington spent years trying to escape. The history the article invokes suggests that those are not the same choice at all.