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A brutal authoritarian regime amassing dangerous weapons. A feckless, deceitful, and puffed-up American government. A president who liberals are largely convinced must be the worst and dumbest in history. A spineless Congress. A divided public. A slew of private contractors and companies that practically have cartoon dollar signs popping up in their eyes. A war allegedly about self-defense, ostensibly for freedom, but maybe just for oil.

For Americans over the age of, say, 35, the Iran war feels awfully familiar.

In 2001, I was a college freshman at New York University, and watched as the twin towers fell and the country convulsed in fear and rage. I watched as we invaded Afghanistan, a move that initially seemed at least somewhat justified, but then, as the Bush administration began making the case for invading Iraq, did not. The administration connected the Iraq war rhetorically, but not at all factually, to a national tragedy, seemingly banking on American ignorance about the Middle East—a national assumption that it was a vast desert of bad guys wishing the U.S. ill—to make the case that taking out Saddam Hussein would somehow partly avenge a terrorist act carried out primarily by Saudi nationals. The primary pretext for it was “weapons of mass destruction”—weapons, it turned out, that never existed, and for which extremely limited evidence was proffered in the first place. The government promised a quick fix: an efficient “shock and awe” bombing campaign; children so thrilled to be liberated they would greet soldiers with flowers in their fists; then, ostensibly, Iraqi democracy. Hussein, George W. Bush promised Americans, was a very bad guy, the worst of the worst, someone who deserved to be disposed of. “After all,” he said, “this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

We protested, on the streets and at the ballot box. But anti-war liberals were a minority back then—large majorities of Americans, including the youngest voters, supported military action in Iraq. Most believed, wrongly, that Hussein had aided in the 9/11 attacks.

Now, in retrospect, public opinion is very different, with most Americans saying that the Iraq war was a mistake. And it’s hard to conclude otherwise. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and the country was nowhere close to a nuclear bomb. The war pitched Iraq into chaos and destabilized the entire region for decades, a debacle from which the Middle East has still not recovered.........

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