Sounds familiar: Was this said about Iraq in 2003, or Iran in 2025? | Israel-Iran conflict News

With Israel and the US engaged in an escalating battle with Iran, Western leaders are utilizing phrases that sound all too acquainted from the lead-up to the Iraq battle.

“At the moment, we’ve got the larger energy to free a nation by breaking a harmful and aggressive regime. With new ways and precision weapons, we will obtain navy targets with out directing violence towards civilians.”

Which will sound like one thing said yesterday, following US strikes on Iran.

But it surely wasn’t.

These phrases had been delivered by United States President George W Bush on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on Could 1, 2003, as he marked the tip of main fight operations in Iraq.

Now, with Israel and the US engaged in an escalating conflict with Iran, world leaders are utilizing language and rhetoric that sound all too acquainted, drawing eerie comparisons to the lead-up to the Iraq battle greater than 20 years in the past.

Acquainted warnings, comparable justifications

Israel and the US have claimed their navy strikes are aimed toward stopping Iran from creating a nuclear weapon. Iran, for its half, insists its nuclear programme is solely peaceable and meant solely for civilian functions.

For greater than three decades, a well-known chorus has echoed from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran is on the verge of creating nuclear weapons. In 2002, he urged the US Congress to invade Iraq, claiming Baghdad was creating weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). He additionally claimed Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons. The US invaded Iraq in 2003, however no WMDs had been discovered.

The most recent surge in inflammatory rhetoric from American and Israeli officers goes past Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions and missile capabilities. More and more, it hints at the potential for regime change, a path the US has an extended and controversial historical past of pursuing within the area.

Historical past repeating?

The battle led by the US and its “coalition of the keen” left Iraq in ruins, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, about 4,500 American troopers lifeless, and the nation destabilised by deepening sectarian battle.

Wanting again, the rhetoric that paved the best way for that invasion appears unsettlingly acquainted. The US, together with the UK, tried to persuade the world that Iraq had WMDs because the battle progressed.

How nicely are you able to inform the distinction? Learn these 10 statements and resolve: had been they made within the lead-up to the 2003 battle or in 2025?