The difficulty of getting out is John Kiriakou’s recurring objection to regime change wars, and he states it as a sequence in which the hard part comes last: “I’ve long said it’s easy to invade a country. It’s easy to overthrow a government. It is very very difficult to get out.”[1][2]
The measure
The evidence Kiriakou offers is duration. “We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. We were in Iraq for 19 years. It’s very difficult.” The point of the arithmetic is that neither war ended when its stated object was achieved; both continued for most of two decades after the governments in question had fallen.[2]
The flowers
Kiriakou attaches to this a memory he flags as one he has told before: he was George Tenet’s note taker at a Principals Committee meeting the night before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, chaired by Vice President Cheney because the President was busy, with Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the head of Central Command and senior National Security Council staff in the room.[2][3]
As the meeting broke up, “one of these bozos from the NSC said kind of loudly, ‘When we cross that border tomorrow, they’re going to throw flowers at us.’” Kiriakou reported the remark to the Deputy Director of the CIA along with his own reaction — “Do these people know nothing about history?” — and got the answer “No, they know nothing about history.”[4][5]
The same meeting produced a second detail Kiriakou returns to: Iran was already being discussed as a target that night. His first question on returning to the office was “Did you know we were going to invade Iran?”, and the answer was “Are they still talking about that? We’re not going to invade Iran.”[4]
The application to 2026
Kiriakou treats the 2026 war as the same error repeated on the schedule the 2003 meeting implied. “Well, again, it’s 24 years later and the conventional wisdom has always been that we’re going to be greeted as liberators and we’re not. We’re greeted as attackers and occupiers.”[5]
His forecast follows directly from that: “And Iranians, for the most part, will fight to the death to save their country from us and from the Israelis. So, nothing good is going to come of this.”[5]