Why America's plans for Iran ground troops spark déjà vu, and grave fears: How US invasions have gone since World War 2

Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam on list of US ground invasions; also cited as cautionary tales by analysts

The Pentagon is preparing plans for weeks of limited ground operations in Iran, potentially including raids on Kharg Island and coastal sites near the Strait of Hormuz. Up to 10,000 additional ground troops are being considered for the Middle East, on top of 1,500 already deployed from the 82nd Airborne unit of the US military. "It does not mean the President has made a decision," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said.

Iran defiant

That means whether Donald Trump will continue to push for talks, or escalate, is unclear.

If indeed a ground invasion comes, the history of what tends to come next is well documented as we look back at all such interventions by the US since World War 2. Those who have studied or lived through America's previous wars are alarmed.

Linda Robinson, a senior fellow at the US-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations who has reported from both Afghanistan and Iraq, has put it plainly: "The risks increase exponentially if US ground forces are deployed to Iran. This is a scenario that US military uniformed leadership has reportedly argued would incur very high casualties and likely risk failure."

After Baghdad fell, the US disbanded the entire Iraqi army, putting hundreds of thousands of armed, trained soldiers suddenly out of work. As one US officer said at the time, it created "450,000 enemies on the ground”. Many of those men formed or joined the insurgency, and the Islamic State grew directly from that chaos. US troops returned in 2014 to fight it, and a residual force remains in Iraq today.

By late 2006, 1.8 million Iraqis had fled to neighbouring countries and another 1.6 million were displaced within Iraq itself. As of 2023, more than 1.1 million remained without a permanent home, as per the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Along the way, photographs emerged of US soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners at a facility called Abu Ghraib. The images, published in 2004, caused international outrage and became a lasting symbol of the war's moral cost, though no senior official was prosecuted.

Linda Robinson of the think tank Council on Foreign Relations said the US military's experience in Iraq was "a testament to hubris”.

She has now warned that deploying special forces into Iran could lead to calls for "larger and larger deployments”, repeating the cycle that defined Iraq after 2003.

"The one certainty about war is its unpredictability," she wrote, “I saw this firsthand in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.”

Afghanistan, 2001

The Taliban’s radical Islamist government fell within weeks of the US invasion, which came as the US launched a hunt for the perpetrators of the terror attack on World Trade Center, New York City, on September 11, 2001.

Twenty years and trillions of dollars later, the Taliban were back in power — returning within days of the American withdrawal in 2021. In between, the US managed to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, whom the Taliban were harbouring at the start of the war. He was living in and was killed in Pakistan, though, in 2011.

Between 2001 and 2021, a total of 2,459 US military personnel died in Afghanistan, with about 1,000 from allied NATO countries. Eighteen 18 CIA operatives were killed, over 20,700 US troops wounded in action; and roughly 3,900 American civilian contractors were killed too. Nearly 50,000 Afghan civilians were killed, and nearly 100,000 fighters too.

Kosovo, 1999

The US led a 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Serbia to stop the killing of ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. Ground troops followed to keep the peace. The intervention had no approval from the United Nations Security Council as Russia and China blocked it. Kosovo declared independence in 2008. Serbia still does not recognise it, nor does Russia, China, or the UN itself.

Somalia, 1993

The US entered Somalia on a humanitarian mission: to protect food aid from being seized by armed militias during a famine. It escalated quickly.

Eighteen American soldiers were killed in a single battle in the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993, the events later depicted in the film ‘Black Hawk Down’.

The US withdrew shortly afterwards. Somalia collapsed into two decades of civil war and famine.

Gulf War 1991

A US-led coalition of 34 nations drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in roughly 100 hours of ground fighting after Saddam Hussein tried annexing his neighbouring country. Saddam stayed in power in Iraq after this war, but was eventually dethroned and hanged after a trial in 2006 as part of the second Iraq intervention by the US.

The large US military bases left behind in Saudi Arabia became one of Osama bin Laden's stated reasons for declaring war on America. Analysts suggest this thread leads to 9/11, and then the American intervention in Afghanistan, and so on.

Vietnam, 1965

This is the war that the Iranians use as a spectre when challenging the US to deploy ground troops. More than 58,000 Americans died in this war of around eight years. Vietnamese deaths are estimated at up to 3 million. The US, fighting for South Vietnam, left without victory. The government it had been propping up collapsed two years later, and the Communist regime of North Vietnam became the administration of a unified Vietnam.

In American pop culture, this war is often cited as a failed adventure that proved deadly at scale. Many famous personalities at the time refused to serve in the US army in Vietnam. These included the boxer Muhammad Ali.

The war left behind a chemical legacy too. To deprive enemy fighters of jungle cover, the US military sprayed a toxic herbicide called ‘Agent Orange’ across vast areas of the Vietnamese countryside. Exposure to this chemical is considered responsible for an abnormally high rate of miscarriages, cancers, birth defects, and severe deformities in Vietnam dating from the 1970s.

In the US, the war ended military conscription, or compulsory service; and produced a deep public suspicion of foreign wars that lasted for decades.

The list runs long

Before these major wars, over 36,000 Americans were killed fighting to “defend” South Korea after the communist regime of the North attacked in the early 1950s. US troops remain stationed in South Korea today. North Korea, the country the US fought to contain, now has nuclear weapons.

Online databases list Panama (1989), Grenada (1983), the Dominican Republic (1965), and Haiti (1994) as part of a similar pattern of swift military success, but limited lasting change.

Trump had used the words “swift and decisive” after the US and Israel launched the latest attack on Iran on February 28. Over a month later, that is clearly not the case.

Trump says the US is currently negotiating with Tehran, though Iranian officials have not agreed to a high-level meeting and remain suspicious of American intentions.

The Pentagon is preparing its military options regardless.