Opposing a war on Iran is not an emotional stance, nor is it an alignment with Tehran’s theocratic regime—a regime that has been cruel enough to harm its own people first, and to export an ideology of domination to its neighbors second. Iran’s rulers, with all their ideological and security layers, need no one to defend them. The real objection comes from somewhere else: from a memory that has not healed, from an Iraqi wound that became a global political lesson in how failure is manufactured.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so under the banners of “liberation” and “weapons of mass destruction.” Two decades later, nothing remains of those slogans except belated admissions.

Even Donald Trump described the invasion as America’s greatest modern failure, as if the world’s superpower needed twenty years to discover what Iraqis understood in the first week: occupation does not bring freedom, and it does not build a state.

Even Donald Trump described the invasion as America’s greatest modern failure, as if the world’s superpower needed twenty years to discover what Iraqis understood in the first week: occupation does not bring freedom, and it does not build a state.

It opens doors that........

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