Fifteen years ago this fall, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, one
of the most compelling public cases for war came not from President
George W. Bush or his backers on Capitol Hill but from a wonky book
written by a former C.I.A. analyst that landed, improbably, on
best-seller lists and nightstands across Washington. Ken Pollack, now a
scholar at the Brookings Institution, argued soberly but forcefully that
a U.S.-led military assault to remove Saddam Hussein was necessary and
affordable, what he called “our best option—or at least our least bad
option.” The book’s title, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” was less nuanced but more memorable than Pollack’s analysis,
which acknowledged the risk of trading “the threat of a nuclear-armed
Saddam for the threat of an Iraq in chaos and civil war.”

The book quickly became the intellectual foundation for proponents of
the Iraq War, many of whom, unlike Pollack, knew nothing about Iraq.
Democratic politicians found an excuse to avoid opposing the President,
a year after the 9/11 attacks. Skeptics were forced to reckon with an
expert endorsement of the Administration’s shoddy intelligence. Like the
decision to invade Iraq, the book has not aged well.

These days, it is hard not to think back to 2002. Now, as then, a new
Administration seems to have come into office with a Middle Eastern
country in its crosshairs: this time, it is Iraq’s neighbor, Iran. Now,
as then, a President is making increasingly menacing threats and
politicizing intelligence to fit alternative facts. And now, as then,
some of the same influential voices outside the Administration will play
a crucial role in either legitimizing or discrediting decisions that
risk another unnecessary and reckless war.

For the last decade, advocates of the Iraq War from both parties have
worn scarlet letters around Washington but few have suffered
professionally, even after “Mission Accomplished” turned into a brutal
sectarian conflict that cost trillions of dollars, claimed the lives of
more than forty-five hundred Americans and many times that
number of Iraqis (most of them civilians), and badly damaged the United
States’s moral and strategic authority in the world.

But several of the Iraq War’s most prominent proponents have experienced
a renaissance of sorts after voicing early, principled, and fervent
opposition to President Trump—whose populist rhetoric and isolationist views they
found distasteful. As a group, they share right-leaning politics,
hawkish foreign-policy views, and strong support for the invasion of
Iraq—and they have, to their credit, emerged as some of the most
unexpected and effective opposition voices.

David Frum coined
George W. Bush’s infamous phrase “axis of evil,” in the speech that laid
a predicate for war. Today his anti-Trump essays in The Atlantic are
among the most trenchant and eloquent anywhere. Max
Boot, of the Council on Foreign Relations, who
wrote on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War that its proponents
had “no need to repent,” has relentlessly assaulted Trump’s
dysfunctional management of national security on television, in print,
and on Twitter.

William
Kristol, the
founder of The Weekly Standard, predicted, in 2003, that the Iraq War’s
proponents would be “vindicated” by the discovery of weapons of mass
destruction, and argued just two years ago that “we were right to fight
in Iraq.” More recently, he has taken Trump to task for everything from
his troubling ties to Russia to his mishandling of North Korea.

And Bret
Stephens was
the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post when, in 2003, it named one of
the Iraq War’s chief architects, Paul Wolfowitz, its “man of the
year,”
trumpeting his role as “principal author” of the doctrine of preëmptive
war that would “underpin U.S. action against other rogue states.” As a
longtime Wall Street Journal columnist, he continued to defend the evidentiary basis for war with Iraq long after it was discredited, but his attacks on Trump reportedly fell out of favor with the paper’s
management, and he decamped earlier this year to the New York Times.

Today, these and other “Never Trump” Republicans have found common cause
with the left-leaning anti-Trump “resistance,” who devour and distribute
their media appearances with a fervor that would have seemed impossible
pre-Trump. This alignment of convenience and conviction will face a
severe test in the coming months, over the looming prospect of yet
another potential conflict in the Middle East. These commentators share
another common view: long-standing support for a more belligerent posture
toward Iran, including military confrontation, regime change, or both.

Opposition to Trump among Iraq War proponents was always partly rooted
in the President’s aversion to activism abroad. They have been right to
decry Trump’s abdication of U.S. leadership, including his disregard for
human rights, his belittling of our alliances, and his kowtowing to
Vladimir Putin. But as a candidate, Trump’s stated suspicion of military
adventurism, particularly in the Middle East, had been one of his
most—of, arguably, few—rational foreign-policy stances. As President,
however, Trump has escalated military action in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, often without articulating a strategy and
without public debate. In the case of Iran, while a formal policy
“review” is still ongoing, Trump’s own proclivity for bluster, and
apparent obsession with undoing whatever President Barack Obama did, is already
leading in a dangerous direction.

Trump has long decried the nuclear deal with Iran as the “worst in
history.” In July, he grudgingly certified to Congress that Iran isimplementing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the formal name of
the deal, from 2015, which degraded Iran’s nuclear program, and
increased the amount of time needed to produce enough fissile material
for a weapon to more than a year, in exchange for sanctions relief. But
Trump also said, in July, that he believes Iran is not complying with
the deal “in spirit.” In another echo of 2002, Trump has reportedly
assigned a team to build a case against the deal, regardless of what the
intelligence might indicate, and despite the fact that the rest of the
world has concluded that Iran is honoring its commitments. International
inspectors, as recently as
Wednesday, have
reiterated an opinion that is shared by Trump’s own State Department:
that Iran is not violating the agreement.

There are many paths that Trump could take to deliver a blow to the
nuclear deal and trigger a crisis with Iran. Two deadlines are looming
this fall: in September, the U.S. must issue a waiver for sanctions
suspended under the J.C.P.O.A.; in October, the U.S. has to certify that
Iran is abiding by the agreement. Trump could decline to certify Iran’s
compliance; re-impose sanctions that were suspended under the nuclear
deal; dramatically increase sanctions on Iran for reasons unrelated to
its nuclear program; or demand that monitors be allowed to visit
sensitive Iranian military sites, in the absence of credible evidence of
wrongdoing, a step that the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations,
Nikki Haley, threatened this week.

From there, the path to conflict, intentional or otherwise, is easy to
imagine. Already, Trump has severed high-level diplomatic contact
between the two countries, which is necessary to address
misunderstandings and prevent small disputes from becoming large ones.
Meanwhile, talk of promoting regime change in Tehran—among Republicans
on Capitol Hill, in conservative Washington policy circles, and even
from some Trump Administration officials—gives Iran’s already paranoid
regime more justification to worry. If Trump imposes new sanctions, Iran
could violate its commitments under the nuclear agreement. A clash
between U.S. military advisers and Iranian fighters who are already
operating in close proximity in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria could take place.
Or, as has happened in the past, Iranian naval vessels could challenge
U.S. warships in the narrow waterways around the Arabian Peninsula.

In any of these scenarios, Trump would be incentivized to lash out at
Tehran, perhaps through direct military action. Some foreign-policy
experts would cheer him, as they did when he fired Tomahawk missiles at the Syrian military after its appalling chemical-weapons attack earlier this year. Iran, faced with
its own political pressures and suspicion of U.S. intentions, almost
certainly would retaliate, most likely in asymmetric fashion, in parts
of the region where Iran has advantages and U.S. interests or forces are
vulnerable. What would happen next is hard to predict and even harder to
control.

Some take comfort in the fact that Trump’s national-security team would
push back against ill-advised military steps. So far, they have
persuaded Trump to leave the nuclear deal in place and removed three of
the most vocal Iran hawks from the National Security Council. But the
Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, who was recently described as having
a “33-year grudge against Iran”;
H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser; and John Kelly, the new
chief of staff, each commanded troops in Iraq when Iran was supplying
its proxy militias with roadside bombs that killed hundreds of
Americans. Whatever they may have done on other issues to curb Trump’s
worst impulses, on Iran, they may not be voices for restraint.

In short, deliberately undermining the nuclear deal risks sparking a
confrontation. And for what? The most compelling rationale for conflict
with Iran—its potential ability to obtain a nuclear weapon—was removed
by the agreement. A hundred and fifty international monitors are
carrying out inspections that will allow the world to know if Iran tries
to cheat.

Clearly, the Iranian regime remains a source of instability in the
Middle East and has brutalized its own people. Sanctions and assistance
to Iran’s rivals should continue to be used to restrain Tehran, but
there is every reason to believe that torpedoing the nuclear deal or
prompting military escalation would only make things worse. Having
worked on these issues under President Obama, who championed the
nuclear deal, and whose rise was fuelled by his opposition to the war in
Iraq, our position is no surprise. The more interesting question now is
what those Trump critics who supported the Iraq War will do. Most have
been conspicuously quiet on this topic, despite their opposition to the
nuclear deal and past support for muscular action.

Given all they have written about the new Administration’s incompetence
and duplicity, will they jump on the bandwagon of another unnecessary
conflict, this time under the authority of a President whom they have deemed
unfit to serve as Commander-in-Chief? We sought their current views.
Most were still thinking through their approach, or else were unwilling
to tip their hand.

Before the deal, Boot had called a “bombing campaign” the “only credible
option” for dealing with Iran, and he later laid out his opposition to
the J.C.P.O.A. in an article titled “Why is the Iran deal bad? Think
North Korea.” He told us by e-mail that Trump should be “doing more to
contain the growth of Iranian power in the Middle East” but acknowledged
that such confrontations are a “tricky business that requires a highly
competent Commander-in-Chief who will not run reckless risks. That is
not a description that applies to Trump.” He also said that the
President “will be making a mistake if he pulls out of the J.C.P.O.A.
absent proof of Iranian cheating, which, as far as I know, does not
currently exist.”

Frum said that he preferred to convey his views on Trump unravelling the
deal in The Atlantic, but rejected a comparison to 2002, arguing it
would be hard to imagine “Trump striking out in October, 2017—with no
preliminary work to build support, zero Democratic buy-in, unsure even
of his own party.” William Kristol, who once wrote that it was “long
since time for the United States to speak to [the Iranian] regime in
the language it understands—force,” and titled an article about the
J.C.P.O.A. “A Very Good Deal—for Iran,” declined to comment. Bret
Stephens, who wrote, on the deal’s first anniversary, that “what
diplomats call” the J.C.P.O.A. is “known to the rest of us as the
Disastrous Iran Deal,” said that he “wrestles with the dilemma” of a
policy he may support but a President he’s not sure he trusts to
implement it.

“Even the best advice, if put through a flawed vessel, is going to come
out wrong on the other side,” he said. “And to me, the lesson of Iraq is
that implementation is nine-tenths of policy. In theory, I might argue
we should get out, negotiate a better deal, use a combination of
sanctions and pressure to reweight our lever, but Iraq tells you that
you have to be extremely careful about thinking through consequences
ahead of time. . . . Among the many reasons the Trump Presidency depresses me
is that I can’t trust him to carry out those few points of his agenda on
which I actually happen to agree.”

The stakes are high—as reckless and unsettling as Trump’s Presidency has
been thus far, he has yet to make a mistake anywhere near as costly as
the Iraq War. If the proponents of that war support Trump’s apparent
willingness to either risk or seek war, they would be giving the
Administration’s dangerous approach credibility and Congress a rationale
to go along. A more consistent response, given their criticism of Trump,
would be to publicly acknowledge that an attempt by this Administration
to confront Iran could have dangerous consequences, or that the
President can’t be trusted to manage it effectively.

For commentators still considering their position—and members of
Congress who may soon be compelled to voice their own—the months leading
up to the Iraq War offer a cautionary tale. In October, 2002, about a
month after Pollack’s book was published, Congress passed the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq with nearly
seventy per cent of members voting in favor. Many later suffered
electoral consequences, disavowed their vote, or have struggled to
justify it ever since.

Only a year after the invasion of Iraq, Pollack published a book on
Iran. This time, he advocated diplomacy to address its nuclear program.
In a follow-up, published in 2013, just weeks before a major
breakthrough in the Obama Administration’s nuclear negotiations, he
argued that deterring a nuclear Iran was preferable to war. He also
claimed that his earlier book on Iraq had been misinterpreted by those
who “read nothing but the subtitle or cherry-picked lines from it.”

In recent weeks, Pollack told us that while he favors a more assertive
approach to counter Iran’s regional meddling, he believes it would be a
mistake to jeopardize the nuclear deal or risk a major conflict. In
describing his intellectual journey, Pollack is the first to acknowledge
the burden he carries from the Iraq precedent. No one should blame, or
credit, those without an official position or authority for any major
policy decision. That responsibility ultimately rests with the President
we elect. Nor should anyone assume that advice can be given, or heeded,
without consequence, particularly if it would once again urge the
country down a path to war.