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Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom
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Twenty years after the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, one of the war's chief architects says the Bush administration's biggest error was not making the conflict an even bloodier, costlier catastrophe.
Writing in National Review, former Bush and Trump adviser John Bolton defends the decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime and expresses regret for only one aspect of the decadeslong debacle: that America didn't use the opportunity to destabilize Iran too. Having already invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, Bolton writes, the Bush administration should have tried to go three-for-three and "seek regime change in between, in Iran, before Tehran's own WMD programs neared success."
"Unfortunately," he concludes, "as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon."