During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, Newsweek reported on the Bush administration’s plans to bring about wholesale regime change across the Middle East and beyond. While notions of toppling the Saudi monarchy, ousting then–Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and attacking North Korea were kicked around the D.C. foreign policy community, with varying levels of resistance to each, there was one idea that found wider support than the rest — invading Iran. As a “senior British official” told Newsweek at the time, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”

That “everyone’s” desire to go to Baghdad turned out to be catastrophically wrong-headed has not diminished that dream of a “peance freeance secure” Iran (as George Bush memorably said of Iraq), at least not among the more hawkish DC foreign policy types. And really, the US fixation on regime change in Iran long predates the Bush administration. That drive started in earnest the day a group of Iranian students burst into the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, sparking the 444-day-long Iran hostage crisis. It’s waxed and waned in the decades since, but it’s never entirely disappeared. At the moment, it is definitely waxing, with Donald Trump last night apparently ordering, and then retracting, a strike against Iran.

US hawks are newly energized over two recent attacks on tankers in waters around the vital Strait of Hormuz and the shooting down of a US surveillance drone that allegedly entered Iranian airspace. On May 12, four oil tankers were damaged by what officials from the United Arab Emirates called “sabotage” off the coast of Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman. Reports of damage varied from ship to ship, but all four vessels survived, there were no casualties, and no major oil spills as a result. The Trump administration concluded, without explaining how, that Iran was responsible, and an investigation led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE — Tehran’s two main regional adversaries — concluded that a “state actor” had perpetrated the attacks. That investigation didn’t point the finger directly at Iran, but the implication was unmistakable.