Iran Is Not Libya. It’s Not Iraq Either.
The comparisons are flying fast and loose. As Israel continues to dismantle Iran’s nuclear weapons program with surgical precision, and as President Trump weighs the next phase of American involvement, critics and skeptics are reaching for two familiar cautionary tales: Libya and Iraq.
But Iran is not Libya. And it is not Iraq either. The current campaign has a defined, lawful objective. It is not regime change. It is not nation-building. It is not an open-ended war. The mission is the complete and irreversible destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. That mission is already well underway and showing results.
In 2011, NATO intervened in Libya under the banner of humanitarian protection. Within months, the mission morphed into full-scale regime change. Gaddafi was killed. His government collapsed. And the coalition walked away. Libya descended into chaos, with rival factions, terrorist safe havens, and foreign powers turning the country into a proxy battlefield. The state ceased to function. There was no plan for the day after.
Iran is not Libya. It is not a broken shell of a state held together by one strongman. It has a functioning economy, strong institutions, a middle class, and a deep bench of scientists, engineers, and institutions. Iran is not going to unravel because key nuclear facilities are destroyed. It will not spiral into anarchy from airstrikes. It is far more resilient, far more dangerous, and far more embedded in regional and global power dynamics.
The Iraq comparison is just as flawed. Iraq was a full-scale invasion. It was based on faulty intelligence and executed with no coherent postwar plan. It involved hundreds of thousands of American troops, a toppling of the entire government structure, and years of bloody counterinsurgency and sectarian violence. That war left deep scars on U.S. foreign policy and strategic credibility.
What is happening now with Iran looks nothing like Iraq. There are no American boots on the ground. There is no occupation. There is no attempt to transform Iran into a Western-style democracy. This is a limited military campaign targeting a specific threat: the infrastructure, personnel, and technology behind Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons effort.
Israel has already delivered devastating blows to Iran’s nuclear program. Enrichment facilities at Natanz and Isfahan have been struck. The heavy water plutonium reactor at Arak has been rendered unusable. Multiple weaponization labs have been destroyed. According to reports, 14 of the 15 nuclear scientists on Israel’s high-value target list have been eliminated. That is not symbolic. That is strategic victory. The only parallel would be eliminating Oppenheimer and every member of the Manhattan Project before they ever arrived at the Los Alamos Laboratory.
President Trump is not rushing in because there is no need to. Israel is achieving the mission step by step. Trump is using the time to mitigate risks, prepare for contingencies, and hold the cards. American assets are moving into the region not to invade, but to finish the job if needed, or to deter escalation. The choice now lies with the regime in Tehran. As Trump might say, we have the cards, Israel has the cards, and Iran can take the diplomatic offramps offered by the United States and Europe, or it can continue on a path that ends with its program being destroyed.
This is not the beginning of a new war. This is the long-overdue end of a decades-long campaign by Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, destabilize the region, and threaten the world. It is a campaign being carried out with intelligence, airpower, cyber capabilities, and precision. There is no appetite for occupation. There is no plan for regime change. There is only a clear, achievable military objective rooted in international law and shared security interests.
If the Iranian regime collapses under the weight of military defeat, economic pressure, and domestic unrest, that will be the result of its own failures. But that is not the goal. The goal is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state. Nothing more, and nothing less.
This is not Libya. This is not Iraq. This is strategic clarity in action. And it is working.
John Spencer is executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute.
He is the coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare
Learn more at www.johnspenceronline.com
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The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.