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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. The war in Afghanistan, waged largely because the Taliban was protecting the terrorist networks that had attacked America, wound up similarly ruinous. After 20 years, the U.S. finally executed a chaotic and ill-planned withdrawal; the Taliban swiftly retook power and returned the country to the regressive, misogynistic, and miserable nation it was before 9/11. On the home front, mass government surveillance efforts defied constitutional protections for American citizens. A shocking number of American soldiers behaved abominably, from torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib to engaging in the most horrifying of atrocities, including gang rape and murder. Administration lawyers and leaders went to great lengths to legalize torture, indefinite imprisonment, domestic spying programs, and many other abuses; to this day, prisoners remain held in Guantánamo Bay. In the two decades that followed the Iraq invasion, al-Qaida expanded its reach, the heady protests of the Arab Spring fizzled out, and wars in Libya and Syria kicked off and trudged on, fueling refugee crises that sent the politics of the U.S. and Europe spiraling rightward. ISIS rose to deadly power, America spent trillions upon trillions, and Iran was able to expand its own power and influence.

It is difficult to look at America’s post-9/11 wars and pinpoint one positive thing that came out of them. And so it is especially discombobulating to feel as though we’re repeating them—except this time with even less justification and (somehow) even worse people in charge.

The justifications for attacking Iran remain in flux. “Freedom” for the Iranian people is the closest the administration has gotten to a coherent pretext, and it’s not a wholly misguided one. The theocratic Iranian regime was among the most abusive and oppressive in the world, recently massacring thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of protesters—exact numbers are unclear because the regime has gone to great lengths to conceal its crimes. Iranian women have been particularly persecuted, with any alleged behavioral, social, or sartorial infractions punished by a harsh morality police. The regime is widely despised, and Iranians and members of the diaspora the world over have long been hoping for its downfall. Even those who distrust Donald Trump are hanging on to some hope that he may, however improbably, deliver them from evil. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump said last month as the U.S. began its bombing campaign.

But this is a president who supports and admires autocrats across the world—so long as they’re personally friendly to him. While Trump says he must have a hand in picking Iran’s new leader, there is so far no evidence that such a selection hinges on anything other than a promise to be Trump-friendly. And, to state the obvious, an American president selecting an Iranian leader is not exactly a democratic process.

With each day, the administration provides a new reason for war. At one point, it was because Iran was close to producing nuclear weapons. (It is not.) At another, that Iran was close to having missiles that could hit the U.S. (It is not.) The 1979 Iran hostage crisis has been trotted out, as has the existence of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Hamas militias. The war was self-defense, the administration has said, although the theoretical attacks we were defending against seem to be many years off in the future. Some members of the administration have promised that regime change would come swiftly and the U.S. could pull back within a few days; others have cautioned that this could take a while. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the U.S. went to war because Israel did; actually, Trump responded, “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.” About a week into the war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that we went to war because “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

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Most Americans, it seems, have learned something from our recent history, even if this administration has not. Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose military action in Iran, just 44 percent support it, and only 36 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation.

For elder millennials like me, this war feels something like déjà vu—or perhaps a bad dream that never quite ends. In those shocked and disquieting months after 9/11, when Americans felt newly vulnerable, I could at least wrap my mind around the case for war to dismantle the groups that had perpetrated the attack, and even the very human desire for revenge. I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but I could also understand why some otherwise liberal-minded people supported it. If Saddam Hussein, an unstable and bloodthirsty dictator who had previously amassed an enormous arsenal of weapons and had used chemical and biological ones before, really was on the brink of possessing region-destroying weapons, that certainly needed to be addressed. My view at the time was that the evidence in support of war was far too thin, and the administration far too cagey with it. But even I didn’t fully clock just how fast and loose the Bush administration played with the facts in its case for war—even I didn’t predict that after the invasion, weapons inspectors would find nothing.

The Iraq war was for millennials what the Vietnam War was for boomers a few decades before, a generation-defining event. Vietnam, of course, was particularly resonant because of the draft and the high death toll, but both sowed deep distrust in our government and deep cynicism toward American claims that we were spreading the gospels of freedom and democracy. The Iraq war made some of us ashamed—or at least made some of us consider sewing Canadian flag patches on our backpacks when we traveled. Unlike those in generations ahead of us, who remember a time when the U.S. was the definition of global cool and a desire for blue jeans brought down the Berlin Wall, those of us who came of age in a post-Iraq era understand that our country is both feared and envied, seen as a sometimes-great place where the impossible can happen, but also often as erratic, ignorant, and potentially extraordinarily dangerous.

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The Iraq war was also a veil-pulling moment for a number of Americans, a time when many who had supported the war in its run-up found themselves grappling with the reality of getting it badly, terribly wrong. Or perhaps many did no grappling at all, convincing themselves that they had always been against it, or maybe just not thinking about it—a privilege not on offer to the scores of Iraqis who lost family members and loved ones. In any event, there is now a decidedly negative national narrative around Iraq, a consensus that the war was an error and a hit to America’s global reputation.

When it comes to Iran, that seems to be the consensus from the beginning. There is no veil to be pulled back here, no coherent pretext to watch fall apart, no recent mass killing of Americans to allegedly avenge. Whether the war’s early unpopularity will change the course of events, though, remains an open question. We can and should hope for a better outcome for Iranians than for Iraqis: freedom from an oppressive regime, minimal death and destruction, a smooth democratic transition, a functional democracy, a peaceful and prosperous society. But for those of us who feel as if we’ve seen this movie before, it’s hard not to feel awfully apprehensive about how it all ends.

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