No, they did not welcome Americans with open arms — and the fact that anyone in Washington is recycling this logic in 2026 should alarm every taxpayer and every family with a member in uniform. In 2003, prominent Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya predicted that Iraqi Shiites would greet American invaders with “sweets and flowers.” What actually happened was that initial Shia tolerance of the occupation evaporated within a year, Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia launched armed resistance in Sadr City and across southern Iraq, and the United States found itself mired in a sectarian civil war that dragged on for years, cost upward of $1 trillion, and resulted in thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed — all predicated on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Now, as the US and Israel prosecute a military campaign against Iran in March 2026, the same breed of optimistic assumptions about how a foreign population will react to American intervention is making the rounds again. Iran is 3.5 times the size of Iraq with approximately 90 million citizens of diverse ethnic backgrounds.
The US Embassy in Baghdad was attacked on March 7, 2026, by Iranian-backed militias, and Iraqi Shia militia groups have launched dozens of attacks on US military bases. This article examines how the “greeted as liberators” narrative collapsed in Iraq, what it cost in blood and treasure, and why the current Iran parallel should be taken seriously by anyone paying attention to history. The Iraq debacle was not a failure of hindsight. It was a failure of willful ignorance, and the warning signs were visible to anyone who cared to look. Understanding how that happened is the first step toward recognizing the same pattern unfolding now.
Table of Contents
- Why Did Washington Believe Iraq’s Shia Population Would Welcome American Forces?
- How Fast Did Shia Tolerance of the American Occupation Collapse?
- The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong in Iraq
- How Does Iran Compare to Iraq — and Why Does It Matter?
- The Danger of Recycling Old Lies for New Wars
- What Iraqi Shia Militias Are Doing Right Now
- Where This Goes From Here
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Did Washington Believe Iraq’s Shia Population Would Welcome American Forces?
Iraq’s Shia majority — approximately 60 to 65 percent of the population — had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated Baathist regime for decades. The logic seemed straightforward to war planners: remove the dictator who had brutalized them, and the Shia would be grateful. Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-born intellectual who had written extensively about Saddam’s atrocities, became one of the most influential voices pushing this narrative in Washington. His prediction of “sweets and flowers” was exactly what policymakers wanted to hear, and it provided convenient political cover for an invasion that was already being sold on the separate — and false — claim of weapons of mass destruction. What the planners got wrong was nearly everything about how Iraqi society actually worked. According to research from the Wilson Center, Iraqi Shiites initially adopted a “wait and see” approach after the 2003 invasion, and all major Shiite groups recognized the importance of cooperating with the occupation authority immediately after the war.
But cooperation is not the same as welcome, and tolerance is not the same as gratitude. Even in the Shia-majority south, Saddam Hussein had supporters, and his removal did not create a grateful, unified population. It created a power vacuum that was quickly filled by militant Sadrists and Iranian-backed factions who had their own agendas — none of which included serving as a rubber stamp for American objectives. The comparison to current events is hard to miss. As former diplomat Richard Haass has observed, “poor planning, overly ambitious goals, and not thinking through the aftermath” are common threads between the 2003 Iraq invasion and the current air campaign against Iran. The question is whether anyone in a position of authority is willing to learn from this history or whether we are watching the same movie for the second time.
How Fast Did Shia Tolerance of the American Occupation Collapse?
The timeline of disillusionment in Iraq was remarkably short. Within one year of the invasion, Shiite gratitude and tolerance of the occupation had “all but evaporated,” according to analysts at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. This was not a gradual, decades-long souring of relations. It took roughly twelve months for the largest demographic group in Iraq — the very people who were supposed to be America’s natural allies — to turn from cautious cooperation to outright hostility. Muqtada al-Sadr, a young Shia cleric with a massive following among Iraq’s urban poor, organized armed resistance that resulted in intense fighting concentrated in Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood, and across cities in southern Iraq. However, if anyone assumes that the Shia resistance was monolithic or purely ideological, they would be wrong about that too. The fractures within Iraq’s Shia community were themselves a source of instability.
Some factions were backed by Iran. Others were motivated by local grievances — unemployment, lack of services, and the heavy-handedness of American military operations in civilian areas. Still others were criminal enterprises exploiting the chaos. The point is that even the population segment Washington had counted on as friendly turned out to be a complex web of competing interests, none of which aligned neatly with American goals. This complexity is a warning for anyone who looks at Iran’s population and imagines a simple narrative of liberation and gratitude. Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department official who led counter-IED operations in Iraq, has written in CounterPunch as recently as March 4, 2026, that lies about Iran’s role in Iraq are being recycled to justify the current conflict. Hoh argues that most US casualties in Iraq were caused by Sunni insurgent groups with no ties to Iran, not Iranian-backed Shia militias — a fact that complicates the narrative being used to justify military action against Tehran.
The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong in Iraq
The financial and human cost of the Iraq War is staggering even by the standards of American military spending. The war cost upward of $1 trillion — a figure that does not fully account for long-term veterans’ care, interest on borrowed money, or the economic disruption caused by sustained military deployment. Thousands of American soldiers were killed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. An entire country’s infrastructure was shattered, and a sectarian civil war was ignited that destabilized the broader Middle East for a generation. All of this was predicated on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. That fact cannot be repeated often enough, because the pattern of justification matters.
The Iraq War was not an accident or a miscalculation. It was the result of a deliberate campaign to shape intelligence around a predetermined conclusion, and the “greeted as liberators” narrative was a key component of selling the war to the American public. When that narrative collapsed on contact with reality, there was no Plan B. The occupation stumbled forward for years, consuming lives and resources, because no one in authority had seriously planned for the possibility that the rosy predictions were wrong. For a site focused on government accountability, this is the core issue. The people who made these predictions were not held accountable. Many of them went on to lucrative careers in media, think tanks, and consulting. The soldiers who served multiple deployments and the Iraqi civilians who lost everything paid the price for decisions made by people who never had to live with the consequences.
How Does Iran Compare to Iraq — and Why Does It Matter?
NPR reported on March 9, 2026, that Iran is approximately 3.5 times the size of Iraq with around 90 million citizens of diverse ethnic backgrounds. That alone should give pause to anyone suggesting that military intervention in Iran will produce a quick, clean outcome. Iraq, with roughly 25 million people in 2003, consumed the full attention and resources of the American military for years. Iran is a fundamentally larger, more complex, and more capable adversary. The comparison extends beyond geography and population. Iran has a functioning military and security apparatus that Iraq in 2003, weakened by a decade of sanctions, did not.
Iran’s population, while not uniformly supportive of the current regime, has a strong tradition of national pride and resistance to foreign interference — a sentiment that tends to intensify, not diminish, when bombs start falling. The tradeoff that policymakers seem unwilling to acknowledge is this: air campaigns may degrade military infrastructure, but they do not win hearts and minds. They tend to unite populations against the attacker, regardless of how those populations felt about their own government the day before the first strike. Richard Haass, drawing on his experience as a diplomat, has been explicit about this parallel. The same pattern of poor planning, overly ambitious goals, and failure to think through the aftermath is visible in the current approach to Iran. General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in Iraq during the surge, has been providing analysis on what comes next in Iran — and the fact that a retired general known for managing the consequences of the last catastrophic miscalculation is being consulted about this one should itself be a warning sign.
The Danger of Recycling Old Lies for New Wars
Matthew Hoh’s March 2026 essay in CounterPunch makes a specific and documented case that the justifications being offered for military action against Iran rely on distortions about what happened in Iraq. Hoh, who served as a Marine in Iraq and later resigned from the State Department over the war in Afghanistan, argues that the narrative of Iranian-backed militias being responsible for the bulk of American casualties in Iraq is false. Most US casualties, he writes, were caused by Sunni insurgent groups — the Islamic State’s predecessors, former Baathists, and tribal fighters — who had no operational connection to Tehran. This matters because the same claim — that Iran is the hidden hand behind every threat to American forces in the region — is being used to build the case for the current conflict. If the factual basis for that claim is wrong, then the policy built on top of it is built on sand.
The limitation here is important to acknowledge: Iran did support Shia militia groups in Iraq, and those groups did conduct attacks on American forces. That is documented and not in dispute. But the scale and centrality of that support has been systematically exaggerated to serve a political narrative, and Hoh’s argument is that the exaggeration is happening again. The attacks on the US Embassy in Baghdad on March 7, 2026, and the dozens of attacks by Iraqi Shia militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces — on US military bases are real and serious. But they are also a predictable consequence of military escalation in the region, not evidence that the initial decision to escalate was correct. Conflating the two is exactly the kind of circular reasoning that trapped the United States in Iraq for nearly a decade.
What Iraqi Shia Militias Are Doing Right Now
The Popular Mobilisation Forces, or PMF, are Iraqi Shia militia groups that were formally incorporated into Iraq’s security apparatus after the fight against ISIS. In the current conflict, these groups have launched dozens of attacks on US military bases in Iraq, and Iranian-backed militias attacked the US Embassy in Baghdad on March 7, 2026, as the US-Israel war on Iran escalated. This is the direct, real-world consequence of the assumption that Shia populations in the region would remain passive or even supportive of American military action against Iran.
The irony is thick. The same Shia population that was supposed to welcome Americans in 2003 has produced the armed groups now attacking American positions in 2026. The political and military infrastructure that grew out of the post-invasion chaos in Iraq — the very chaos that the “greeted as liberators” crowd failed to anticipate — is now an active threat to US forces and diplomatic personnel in the region.
Where This Goes From Here
The central lesson of Iraq, which multiple analysts and former officials are now stating publicly, is that initial military success means nothing if you have not planned for what comes after. Air campaigns can destroy targets. They cannot build stable governments, win over hostile populations, or prevent the kind of power vacuum that breeds insurgency and civil war.
Iran, at 3.5 times the size of Iraq and with a population nearly four times as large, presents a challenge of a fundamentally different magnitude. The question for American policymakers, and for the public that will ultimately bear the costs, is whether the Iraq experience has produced any institutional learning whatsoever — or whether the same assumptions, the same optimistic predictions, and the same refusal to plan for failure will produce the same results at a much larger scale. The attacks already underway on US positions in Iraq suggest that the aftermath is not a future problem. It is a current one.
Conclusion
The prediction that Iraq’s Shia majority would welcome American forces with open arms was not just wrong — it was a catastrophic failure of analysis that contributed to a war costing upward of $1 trillion, thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. The initial Shia tolerance of the occupation lasted roughly a year before armed resistance, sectarian civil war, and a power vacuum filled by militant factions made the optimistic predictions look delusional in hindsight. Every element of that failure — the overly ambitious goals, the poor planning, the refusal to think through the aftermath — is now being identified by former diplomats, military officers, and analysts in the current Iran conflict. The facts are not ambiguous.
Iran is 3.5 times the size of Iraq with 90 million people. Iraqi Shia militias are already attacking US bases and diplomatic facilities. The justifications for the current conflict are being challenged by veterans who served in Iraq and saw firsthand how the intelligence was shaped to fit the policy. For anyone who cares about government accountability, fiscal responsibility, or the lives of American service members, the Iraq parallel is not an academic exercise. It is a flashing red warning that the same mistakes are being made again, at a larger scale, with consequences that have already begun to materialize.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Iraqi Shiites initially support the American invasion in 2003?
Not exactly. According to the Wilson Center, Iraqi Shiites adopted a “wait and see” approach and avoided taking arms against Americans. All major Shiite groups recognized the importance of cooperating with the occupation authority immediately after the war, but this was pragmatic tolerance, not enthusiastic support. That tolerance evaporated within approximately one year.
Who predicted Iraqis would greet Americans with “sweets and flowers”?
Kanan Makiya, a prominent Iraqi dissident and exile who was influential in Washington policy circles before the 2003 invasion. His prediction became one of the most infamous miscalculations of the Iraq War era.
How does Iran compare to Iraq in terms of size and population?
According to NPR reporting from March 2026, Iran is approximately 3.5 times the size of Iraq with around 90 million citizens of diverse ethnic backgrounds, making it a significantly more complex challenge than Iraq was in 2003.
Were Iranian-backed militias responsible for most US casualties in Iraq?
Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department official who led counter-IED operations in Iraq, argues that most US casualties were caused by Sunni insurgent groups with no ties to Iran, not Iranian-backed Shia militias. Iran did support Shia militia groups that conducted attacks on US forces, but Hoh contends the scale of Iranian responsibility has been systematically exaggerated.
Are Iraqi militias currently attacking US forces?
Yes. As of March 2026, Iraqi Shia militias — the Popular Mobilisation Forces — have launched dozens of attacks on US military bases in Iraq. The US Embassy in Baghdad was attacked on March 7, 2026, by Iranian-backed militias as the US-Israel war on Iran escalated.