Front Burner - In Iran, echoes of the Iraq war

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is nearly one-month old and the shadow of another war looms over this one: Operation Iraqi Freedom, George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.Today on Front Burner, a documentary about the Iraq war and its parallels and differences with what is happening now. Featuring interviews with three veteran reporters: Jane Arraf, Jonathan Landay, and Jeremy Bowen.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating eminent threats from the Iranian. regime. Two solemn presidential declarations of war, 23 years apart, both foreshadowed in state of the union addresses. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.

The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world's number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can't let that happen. Both egged on for months with rhetoric of a dire nuclear threat. There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon,

but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think the odds are unacceptably high, that we would find out with a mushroom cloud over New York City or Los Angeles or Tel Aviv and Israel. both sold as welcomed by the local population. Things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people. My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. All over Iran, the voices of the Iranian people could be heard cheering and celebrating in the streets when his death was announced. And both were projected to be swift victories.

I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks. or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. And that's why we don't talk about, you can save four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three. It's still not clear when Donald Trump's war with Iran will end. When are you going to know when it's over? When I feel it. Okay.

I feel it in my bones. But Bush's invasion of Iraq dragged on for nearly nine years. Obviously, the war in Iraq is a big, fat mistake. All right? Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination railing against his fellow Republicans for their positions on the Iraq war. It took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced the president, took him five days. He went back. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say. And he ultimately said it was a mistake.

During his first presidential run, he hammered Hillary Clinton on the same thing. I said it's a terrible and a stupid thing. It's going to destabilize the Middle East, and that's exactly what it's done. Opposition to the Iraq War is an essential part of his political brand. In Iraq, so they spent, President Bush went in. I strongly disagreed with it, even though it wasn't my expertise at the time, but I had a, I have a very good instinct about things. They went in.

And I said that's a tremendous mistake. So now Trump's people are quick to say that they're not making the same mistake all over again in Iran. To the media outlets and political left screaming endless wars. Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. We look back on that era of George Bush and the invasion of Iraq as maybe one of the most terrible foreign policy. decisions we had seen. This is Jane Araf. She's now an international correspondent for National Public

Radio. It's not up to us as journalists to determine whether foreign policy was the right thing to do, but being on the ground, you could see the disastrous effects it had. At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she was CNN's Baghdad Bureau Chief. On the eve of the war, breaking out, I still thought, no, this isn't going to happen. Even as it was happening, even as the fighting was going on and villages were being emptied and we were seeing people killed. Honestly, and I know this sounds stupid, it was still hard to believe that it was happening. I feel that way more now. Because it isn't just one country, is it? It's one country that is the foundation for so many other regional dynamics. And the potential for this all to go wrong, because again, like Iraq,

there doesn't seem to have been a lot of planning for what would happen next. The consequences for this region, and particularly for neighboring countries, and I'm in Iraq right now, are so potentially catastrophic that it makes it even harder to believe that this is happening. Araf was also in Iraq during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. And back in the U.S., the Bush administration was signaling, its plans pretty clearly. Well, we had a problem with Iraq before September 11th. We have a problem with Iraq after September 11th.

But perhaps we see it with a little more clarity now, what it means to have a threat that's out there lurking, a hostile threat to the United States and not to be able to get to that threat before it gets to you. We heard that Iraq was a threat from then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, from Vice President Dick Cheney. Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot really gauge.

Intelligence is an uncertain business, even in the best of circumstances. From Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. We know they have weapons of mass destruction. We know they have active programs. There isn't any debate about it. And of course, from George W. Bush himself. I take the threat very seriously. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously.

They promoted several notions. The first, that Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that Iraq was the subject of one of the most, if not the most intrusive international inspection regimes ever devised, was still producing and developing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons. This is Jonathan Landay. He's a national security correspondent for Reuters in Washington, D.C. And this was their number one assertion for the need to take action against Saddam. And then they linked that idea that he had all of these terrible weapons to allegations that he had been in touch with, or his people had been in touch with the Al-Qaeda extremist network.

And they raised this idea that Saddam could not be allowed to provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda for use against the United States and its allies. Now, both these notions were founded on exaggerated, and bogus, well, I hesitate to call it intelligence, information. In the lead up to the war, Lande worked for a now defunct news agency called Knight Ritter. He and his reporting team were some of the only American journalists publishing skeptical stories about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction. When I first started looking into this whole question of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein

as posited by the Bush administration, I actually believed that Saddam was looking to develop an arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. But then the more I dug into that issue, the more I became convinced that it was impossible because the Saddam regime was under a microscope, an international microscope. One of the things I learned was that if you are developing a nuclear weapon or trying to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon via this method that uses these machines called centrifuges to spin it and purify it. You need a very large power source, and no one had discovered such a power source in the inspection operation. Despite UN inspectors turning nothing up, the U.S. continued its accusations and dismissed Iraq's denials out of hand. What do you make of the statement made by the Iraqi government, the statement by the Iraqi government yesterday, that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and is not developing any. They're lying. Next.

The Bush administration would not be dissuaded. I remember Vice President Cheney speaking before, I think it was. the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, and I believe it was in the summer of 2002, where he said, But we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. There was no one, really, who knew anything about Saddam's weapons programs. They believe that. All in all, the more I dug in their case for war when it came to this alleged weapons of mass destruction program, the more I became convinced that it didn't exist.

It was very lonely experience. The late Rob Reiner even made a movie about Knight Ritters reporting. Lande's character is played by Woody Harrelson. What I want to know is, is Dick Cheney ignoring good intelligence that contradicts his assumptions? Or is he just getting bad intelligence? the vice president is lying. And sometimes, you know, I would experience sleepless nights full of doubt, having published, you know, whatever the latest story that we had published,

because I wasn't sure, you know, I was saying to myself, why isn't anybody else doing this? And in the end, it turned out that we were the only ones who were getting it right. and the rest of the so-called mainstream media led by the New York Times were getting it wrong and being spoon-fed this bogus information directly from senior members of the Bush administration. Fast forward to today, and the situation with Iran's weapons capabilities is very different. Lande says that Iran has enriched uranium to levels just short of what's needed for a nuclear weapon. But still, they were still very short of the steps that are required to develop, produce a nuclear weapon that has assurance that it will work properly. They had not put one together as far as anybody could discern. And in fact, the IAEA.

That's the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear inspector. Rafael Grosie, the head of the IEEA, a couple weeks ago, I think, said that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. There is evidence that it did, in fact, maintain parts of the program, but it had not, as far as anybody could tell, actually put a weapon together and tested one. Also, the president of the United States contended that Iran would soon have, and these are his words, intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States. Well, that also was untrue. And so the idea that they were on the verge and the president contended, oh, they're only two to four weeks away from having a nuclear weapon and using it.

There's no intelligence that I'm aware of that supports that contention. And so while it might be at a different scale, this all feels a bit familiar to landa. I see a parallel between the lack of solid intelligence that the Bush administration had to justify the invasion of Iraq and the lack of solid intelligence backing up President Trump's arguments for why Iran needed to be attacked. In both cases, the intelligence really did not cast in the first. first instance, Iraq, and in this instance, Iran, as imminent threats to U.S. security. These are both essentially wars of choice. Life changes fast. One thing shouldn't. Your storage price. At XYZ storage, lock in your rate for a full year with our industry first locked in pricing promotion. No surprises, no sudden increases. Just secure

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Major U.S. allies like France and Germany refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq. So did Canada, by the way. Because they did not share the same threat analysis that the Bush administration was amplifying in the United Nations and elsewhere. And so we see the same with this war. But at least in the Bush era, efforts were made to enlist the allies. There was that famous presentation by former Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council, where he held up that little vial and said, How much longer are we willing to put up with Iraq's noncompliance before we, as a council, We, as the United Nations, say enough, enough.

This was a little over a month before the invasion that Colin Powell made this presentation with props. He held up a small vial with a blue cap and white powder in it, meant to represent. Less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax, a little bit about this amount. This is just about the amount of a teaspoon. Less than a teaspoon. Anthrax attacks had shocked the nation, killing five Americans just a few years earlier. And here's the U.S. Secretary of State, a highly respected figure in the administration, one who had previously been critical of U.S. military intervention in Iraq, insinuating that Saddam Hussein has tons of this scary, deadly stuff. Tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons.

And where does he deliver this call to action? On the world stage at the United Nations Security Council. I reported on the lead-up to actually both the previous Gulf Wars, the one in 1991 and the one in 2003. And actually, the approach to war was so different back then than the way it was with Donald Trump. This is Jeremy Bowen. He's the international editor of BBC News. In 1990, the first President Bush after Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait, actually went to the UN and got UN resolutions that made it a legal war.

In 2003, with the invasion of Iraq by the second President George Bush, they didn't manage to get the UN resolutions because the French particularly were against it. However, the U.S. administration spent, well, I'd say the best part of a year trying to make the case that war was necessary, not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. The Bush administration had one particular ally who helped them make their pitch abroad. A very articulate and persuasive British Prime Minister Tony Blair made the case that there were weapons of mass destruction secretly being manufactured in Iraq. I mean, I've been going to Iraq right through the 90s. I'd seen what the UN inspectors were doing in terms of taking away, actually not nuclear weapons, but chemical weapons and destroying them.

and I knew the state of disrepair of Iraq after years of sanctions. So I was really, really skeptical. I just thought there's no way they could have weapons of mass destruction. But Tony Blair was so persuasive that I heard him in one crucial parliamentary debate here in the UK and London, making the case that they could threaten Cyprus, that there were missiles. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons. That Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans

for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability. And he was so persuasive. I started doubting myself. I thought, well, maybe I'm wrong on this. Maybe all the evidence that I've accumulated over, what,

by then, about 10 years of reporting in Iraq. maybe it's wrong. He really was very good at making an argument, but it turned out, of course, the argument was 100% incorrect. An official inquiry would later be damning of nearly every aspect of the UK's involvement in the war, finding that Tony Blair overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Still, Blair thinks the current British Prime Minister, Kirstarmur,

should have gotten involved in this war with Iran, saying, we should have backed America from the very. beginning. UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has pushed back on this. I'm calling Tony Blair a poodle. I think the point is to make sure that actually we learn the lessons from some of the things that went wrong in Iraq. And I think that is exactly... Trump has also been critical of Starmor's decision to not immediately support his strikes on Iran. But Trump didn't make much of an attempt to build an international coalition of the willing

before striking Iran with Israel. Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that Canada was not. informed in advance of the strikes and was not asked to participate. And other major U.S. allies were similarly not consulted or advised. Instead, Trump has lashed out at allies for not supporting the war, calling NATO cowards. Domestically, Trump made little effort to build support in Washington. Unlike the war in Iraq, there is no congressional approval for military action in Iran. Yeah, he put the ships there, which made people think, well, something's bound to happen

because this is the biggest buildup since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But when it came, it just came. And he didn't make any attempt to try to sell the idea, particularly to the American people. And his press secretary at the White House said she said something along the lines of... The president prior to that phone call had a good feeling that the Iranian regime was going to strike the United States assets in our personnel. So, you know, he shoots from his gut.

He has a feeling. This was a feeling the president had based on facts. Facts provided to him. Previous U.S. administrations, I think, frankly, took the subject of war and going to war much more seriously. I think he went to war quite lightly. One indication that Jain Araf sees that the Trump administration didn't necessarily think through all the possibilities of a war with Iran, is his apparent surprise. that Iran has retaliated against U.S. allies in the Gulf. They weren't supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East.

Those missiles were set to go after them. So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. It is absolutely extraordinary. Anyone with even the vaguest idea of dynamics in the Middle East, know that Iran is a powerful country that plays the long game. It will have strategies, it will have plans for what happens if the leadership is decapitated. It will use incredible brute force,

as we've seen, to suppress dissent. And it will do everything it needs to do to remain in power. I don't think there is evidence that they thought very hard about what it was. They were going to do because they reckoned that they were going to have a quick victory. We had to do a little excursion, if you don't mind, a little excursion to take care of nuclear weaponry in the hands of maniacs. But other than that, in a couple of weeks, and won't be much longer, it's moving along fast. We're way ahead of schedule. Did you know that, Mr. Speaker? And clearly, that is not happening, and that is why I think President Trump is learning that it is quite easy to start a war. It's really quite quite a lot.

how to end it. The men and women in uniform, U.S. and coalition alike, are performing superbly. They're doing an outstanding job. The resistance that's being encounter was expected. It is not affected coalition progress. Iraqi forces are capitulating by the hundreds. It's a plan that's on track. It's a plan everybody had input to. It's a plan everybody agrees to. It's a brilliant plan. And we've been at it now for less than a week. We're just about to Baghdad. This is the most symbolic moment. The image of the day as Saddam Hussein and his 25-year rule is about to come crashing down. It's featuring on the edge. Six weeks after the initial invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush gave this triumphant speech aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier.

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended in the Battle of Iraq. The United States. United States and our allies have prevailed. Behind the president hung a large banner. Over the Stars and Stripes read the words, mission accomplished. Yeah, well, mission accomplished with George W. Bush, that ended well, didn't it? So when I first went back to Baghdad, it was, of course, controlled by the Americans, although in chaos, looting going on everywhere, building still burning, people coming to our office, the CNN office, and saying that they had documents about nuclear secrets in their car trunk, all sorts of things

happening. But so much of it was soldiers who were confused. They had been told the soldiers, as well as senior officers had been told that it would take a few weeks. I think six weeks was what I heard most, that they would be there for six weeks. And then in that six weeks, everything fell apart. Does that mean you couldn't go in there and take a television camera or get a still photographer and take a picture of something was imperfect, untidy?

I could do that in any city in America. Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots and problems and looting. Stuff happens. But in terms of what's going on in that country, it is a fundamental misunderstanding

to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, oh my goodness, you didn't have a plan. That's nonsense. They know what they're doing and they're doing a terrific job and it's untidy and freedom's untidy and free people are free to make mistakes. You know, it's hard to do justice in words to the way that Iraq fell apart because it fell apart violently and imploded. Well, it was, it's not too strong a word. It was catastrophic. I remember standing outside the palace in 2003 in the searing heat. It was summer by then. And the order had been

given to disband the army because it was Saddam Hussein's army, which meant that literally thousands of army generals were out of work and lots of arms still floating around. And there were a couple of them who had dressed up in suits in the heat, because that's what you do when you're going to a formal meeting. And they were trying to persuade a, a very young soldier at one of the gates that they should be allowed in to talk to someone in charge. And he wouldn't let them in because he didn't have orders to let them in. But it's that image that kind of stays with me,

the imbalance, the tragic misunderstanding of that country. The massive vacuum that opened up at the top after the removal of the regime, the way that they made some really serious mistakes in their governance, not least their decision to abolish the army, to fire thousands of men and hundreds of thousands of pensioners who had all trained soldiers, many of whom in their anger at having lost their positions and their pensions and their salaries, moved over to the insurgency. So Al-Qaeda gained ground.

Al-Qaeda was seen as protecting Sunnis and also fighting the Americans. Al-Qaeda began attacking Shia Muslims, who are the majority in Iraq. The Shia formed groups that fought with al-Qaeda. These groups were fighting in the street. The U.S. was fighting against them. All of this took years to unravel, years of a military campaign. You know, the U.S. tried different strategies. At one point, it resorted to forgiving those who had been involved in attacks on U.S. forces

and working with them. It was called The Awakening, and it was mostly Sunni tribes who joined forces with the U.S. They resorted to surging troops into Iraq because they wanted to basically envelop communities with U.S. forces. One thing that those really troubled years did was they incubated hardline jihadist movements, and the most notorious of which came out of the wrong. remains of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and it became known as Islamic State, ISIS. They tried a lot of different military strategies, and in the end, what they were left with. And this is another of my very vivid memories. It is of Iraq emptying. It is every time I would

fly out of the airport, I would see all of these people, nicely dressed families, you know, a lot of them professionals, holding plastic ID documents. from the International Organization for Migration, which was arranging flights for people who had applied for and received approval for asylum in other countries. And Iraq just lost so much. The Iraq War went on for nearly nine years. Over two million Iraqis fled the country as refugees,

and many thousands died. Estimates put the number of Iraqi civilians killed directly by violence from the war at approximately 200,000. Other estimates that include deaths from other war-related causes like infrastructure collapse are as high as half a million. We are still far from knowing what the fallout from the war with Iran will be. We don't even know when it will end. But here's what we do know.

Civilian casualties are already mounting, both in Iran and in the region. The impact on the global economy is already enormous. the disruption to the world's oil and gas supply is now considered the largest in history. At the time of recording this on Thursday afternoon, there are not yet U.S. boots on the ground in Iran, but thousands of troops are amassing in the area. And for now, the Islamic Republic is still in charge.

Now in this year, in 2026, the regime has not been removed, even though they killed the Supreme Leader with virtually the first shots of the war. And while they are, As the Americans keep saying, they're very much on schedule when it comes to hitting all their targets, thousands and thousands of targets, doing massive damage. They are not dealing with the sort of the political nub of it or the fact that they can't seem to get rid of the regime. I've been asking people here who live next to Iran, who go there, who do business there.

And what they fear is if the leadership, is toppled, if the regime is toppled, there isn't anything that looks likely or ready to replace it. There are no cohesive opposition groupings. There are opposition groups, but each one of them does not have a huge following in Iran. The opposition in Iran itself has been weakened by the government's brutal reaction to protests. And so what people hear fear to a large extent is that, Iran could fall apart? Oh, I think the consequences of this are going to go on for years. I think it's going to lead to a huge rethink and shake-up. Iran is a really large, important country with an immense sense of itself in a way that other countries maybe don't have. I mean,

Iraq, for example, was a country that was essentially dreamt up by the British, putting together a number of Ottoman provinces after the First World War to form a state that they called Iraq. Iran was never colonized, but it was invaded many times, but it was never colonized in the same way by Western imperial powers. It's a big country. It's four times the size of Iraq. It's got a population of more than 90 million people. It's got an absolutely extraordinary history stretching back, you know, well into before the time. time of Christ. So this huge sense of itself, a sense as well of you can't trust the outsiders because they tend to come in and try and make things much worse for us. And I don't

think it's going to lead to some kind of long-lasting peace in the Middle East as the Israelis are arguing at all. If there have been lessons learned, I'm not seeing it. I like to think there have been. And I think we have to remember a lot of policy decisions aren't necessarily the ones we see in the news and the factors that go into them aren't necessarily known. But I have not seen anything that would explain why it is worth the potential we're facing to see the disintegration of Iran and its effect on the region. We're already seeing huge implications on countries we thought would never be attacked, all of the Gulf countries, the oil installations, everything else. And so once you put all that together, you kind of have to ask, did nobody foresee this?

And if not, why didn't they foresee it? Iran is going to be immensely isolated. I think that there will be supercharged resentment against them from those people in the population, of which there are many, who would like the end of the Islamic regime, they're the Islamic Republic. but they are, I imagine, going to retain enough force to put down demonstrations, probably with at least as much ferocity as they used in January when they killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people. One thought occurs to me, and it's about the way that regimes who believe they're in trouble

have this sense of deliverance and victory in a way if they end up surviving. And the regime in Tehran right now is trying to survive, because they want to preserve the Islamic Republic. I was in Baghdad in 1991 when the allied armies led by the Americans in Operation Desert Storm were pushing. They pushed into Kuwait, they pushed into Iraq, and there was a real belief among the regime people who we dealt with in Baghdad then, the last few days before the ceasefire, that they were on the way out. Their attitude towards us completely changed. changed. They were ingratiating where previously so many of them had been hostile. It was almost as if

they were preparing for the moment when there would be probably American troops in Baghdad. And then when I woke up one morning, I was welcomed by gunfire. I thought, my God, the Americas must be here now. And I was lying in my bed, actually, in the Rashid Hotel I was listening. And I went to the window. And I thought, it's all small arms fire. It's not heavy. There's nothing heavy. It can't be the American. So I looked down and there were guys in the courtyard of the hotel in the garden firing their Kalashnikovs

into the air. And I realized they were celebrating. And what they were celebrating was that there'd been a ceasefire and that George Bush had decided to stop and not push on to unseat Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

So they were, they could not believe their luck. They thought that they had had it. And suddenly they were delivered from that. And what did they do? When there was an uprising of Kurds and Iraqi Shias, they were able to crack down on it with tremendous ferocity and killed thousands of people.

I wonder if there might be any repeat of something a bit like that with Iran. We don't know. Front burner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Joitha Shangupta, Shannon Higgins, Lauren Donnelly, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our intern is Riley Cunningham. Our YouTube producer is John Lee.

Our music is by Joseph Shabbison. Our senior producers are Elaine Chow and Imogen Burchard, who produced today's episode. Our executive producer is Nick McKay Blokos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you all on Monday. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.