"Mission accomplished"

Trump's echo from another imperialist war.

When I hear Donald Trump say the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much,” I can’t help but think about how many times we’ve heard something like this before.

The words are familiar.

It immediately brings to mind the “Mission Accomplished” moment in 2003, when George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath that now-infamous banner and declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. At the time it sounded like closure, like the war had essentially been won.

But it wasn’t. What followed was years of insurgency, thousands more American deaths, and the loss of countless Iraqi lives. The war dragged on for nearly another decade.

And Iraq wasn’t the first time optimism arrived long before the end.

During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland told reporters in 1967 that the end of the conflict was beginning to come into view. The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” soon became shorthand for that moment.

Then came the Tet Offensive just months later, a massive shock that showed the war was far from over. The conflict continued for seven more years.

More recently, we heard similar assurances about Afghanistan. For years officials insisted the Afghan government and its military would be able to stand on their own once the United States withdrew after two decades of war.

But when the withdrawal finally happened in 2021, the Afghan forces collapsed in weeks and the Taliban swept back into Kabul. Twenty years of war ended with the same group in power that the United States had invaded to remove.

Mission accomplished.