American soldiers remove the cover to the “spider hole” where Saddam Hussein was hiding when he was captured in Ad Dawr, Iraq, in 2003. Removing Saddam from power didn’t end the conflict in Iraq.

I still remember the post-9/11 fervor as if it were yesterday. I was a senior in high school when the towers fell. I enlisted in the Army less than a month later, graduated early in May 2002 and was in Afghanistan by December.

At that time, even living in the staunchly liberal Portland, Ore., area, everybody supported my enlistment: teachers, coaches, parents and friends.

Yet what began as military retaliation for the 9/11 attack quickly snowballed into a broader campaign to rid the region of radical Islamic factions. But it didn’t work; war didn’t work.

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I did a tour in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. Each deployment was worse: more death, more carnage, more chaos.

Now it seems that we are dead set on repeating our past mistakes.

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The early stages of the conflict with Iran feel to me like Iraq all over again. The parallels are uncanny. Once again, we seem to think that eliminating a dictator will result in stability.

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It didn’t work in Iraq 20 years ago, and it definitely won’t in Iran today.

As I learned the hard way in Iraq, killing a brutal leader like the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei actually means very little. A violent regime can inflict plenty of damage without its head.

I was in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003. We soldiers celebrated when we heard the news; we thought we’d be packing our gear and heading home in a couple of weeks.

But the war didn’t suddenly end.

I stayed for my entire deployment. A year after that, I went back to Iraq again. Fighting continued for 14 years after Saddam was displaced, executed and forgotten.

Iraqis celebrated in the streets when Saddam was captured. Many Iranians are doing the same now. Many are clearly empowered and relieved by the killing of Khamenei.

Yet it is nearly impossible for me to believe that regime change will translate to pro-Western sentiment.

As Americans, we think we have a monopoly on national pride. The people of Iran have a proud history dating back to the Achaemenid Empire in 550 B.C., over 23 centuries before the United States was founded.

Much like when the American colonies gained independence by defeating Great Britain, the strongest world power at the time, Iran regained its autonomy in 1979 by expelling the Shah and resisting the dominant superpower, the United States. Iran has refused to acquiesce to the whims of the Western powers for nearly half a century, and is not suddenly going to install a Western-friendly government. To expect anything different would be to ignore the lessons of 9/11.

Furthermore, Iran is not Iraq. Nor is it Afghanistan. Iran is a country of over 90 million determined and proud Persians with a long history of American opposition and over 600,000 active and ready troops.

I’m not saying that Iran is a worthy adversary to the United States military on the battlefield. They are not. Honestly, nobody is. It’s not even close.

And that may be the greatest danger.

Iran will hold no naive fantasies of pulling us into a full-fledged ground war. It knows it cannot match our military might. But it will not surrender to our demands either, far from it.

The best-case scenario for America, should we be so boldly stupid as to escalate the war further, is getting pulled back into a long war of attrition that we will eventually either lose or give up on, much like what happened in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are once again in control.

There is no happy ending to this story. In war, there never is.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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Just look at the more than 7,000 dead U.S. troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or ask veterans like me, still haunted by nightmares.

Or you could ask the families of the quarter million civilians killed in those wars.

Joseph Holsworth is a veteran of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

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