Trump Could Leave the Iran Mess to His Successor

Nearly seven months in, the war in Iran seems nowhere close to a conclusion.

Although talks between the United States and Iran continue, including this week, a disengaged Donald Trump appears uninterested in resolving the conflict; his administration has put forth no coherent plan and has not demonstrated the capability to win the war.

Iran’s leadership seems unwilling to end it. (One can hardly blame them: It’s only once the shooting stops and the regime is left with an angry, impoverished population to govern that the leaders’ real troubles begin.) The most significant push for a resolution of some sort is coming from the Gulf States, whose economies are at stake and whose leaders appear inclined to agree to some degree of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, which would have been unacceptable—unthinkable, even—prior to the conflict.

This means that Trump, despite the fact that he has 27 more months in office, is most likely going to attempt to stick the next administration with the unenviable, messy task of resolving this quagmire.

And if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are anything to go by, Republicans will be struck by collective amnesia regarding how this unnecessary, wasteful, destructive war started in the first place—especially if Trump’s successor is a Democrat.

This is the third time this century that the United States has begun a reckless, poorly planned war in the greater Middle East, and the lessons from how the others ended are instructive.

In Iraq, the George W.

Bush administration famously salvaged the war—at the expense of thousands of American and Iraqi lives—by surging troops into the country while it was in the middle of a brutal civil war, which Iraq’s Shia Arabs and Kurdish communities had decisively won by 2008.

Those conditions allowed for the Bush administration to negotiate an honorable Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq in 2008 that affirmed Iraqi sovereignty and required U.S. forces to depart the country by the end of 2011.

Implementing the agreement was, by necessity of time, left to the next administration.

All of this was in the public record, preserved for posterity.

Yet none of it prevented Republican hawks from denouncing what they described as Barack Obama’s “decision” to withdraw from Iraq.

Even today, many Republicans still talk about “Obama’s withdrawal” from Iraq as if it were something unilaterally decided by the 44th president.

The media picked up on this at the time, amplifying Republican talking points and questioning whether “Obama’s decision” was also responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in 2014. [ Read: The Middle East still to come ] If this was not maddening enough, the pattern repeated itself in Afghanistan.