Douglas Murray: humiliatingly wrong over and over again

It really is astonishing just how wrong one man can be

Just how catastrophically wrong can one man be?

Enter Douglas Murray, the hard-right author and perennial cheerleader for war.

Being wrong is one thing. Everyone, after all, makes predictions which brutally collide with reality, or take judgement calls which history later treats as profoundly unwise.

But what we are discussing here is not being just wrong, but consistently and completely wrong about the most important issue there is: whether people live or die on a mass scale.

As we will explore: just how many times can you use your platform to cheer on wars which lead to calamity - and still be taken seriously?

Now, it’s fair to say that I don’t have much in common with this hard-right scribe, who was honoured by Israel’s president and diaspora affairs minister for his advocacy on behalf of the state.

But we both believe the West is in decline. He blames immigration, Islam, multiculturalism, what he sees as the West’s self-flagellation, a lack of self-belief, identity politics, and so on.

I believe it is an economic model based on extraction rather than investment, on Big Finance rather than making things, on sucking wealth ever upwards – fused with military adventurism abroad which has brought shattering strategic defeats for the West while driving bloody turmoil.

The disillusionment and fury all that has spawned has helped drive the rise of an authoritarian far right which threatens the very future of democracy.

I discuss all that in my new book The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It, which is out now.

And there have been few more committed cheerleaders of that military adventurism than Douglas Murray.

His utter wrongness is one thing. But consider, too, the relish with which he treated the supposed humiliation of people who opposed those wars.

We’ll start with Iran. But then there is Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

And this isn’t really just about Douglas Murray, who is a case study. It’s about the West’s warmongers – those who have cheered on and justified wars which have brought death, ruin and chaos on an enormous scale.

If people like Douglas Murray want to ponder the question of Western decline, they should begin by examining themselves in a mirror.

Iran: a ‘short and limited war’

On 15 January 2026, Murray wrote a column for the New York Post headlined ‘Trump has a chance to end Khamenei’s reign of terror in Iran’.

He wrote:

“Trump has a historic opportunity. He could help end Iran’s half-century nightmare and make up for 46 years of foreign policy failure. In doing so, he will prove that — unlike his predecessors — he is the president who stood for freedom in the face of terror.”

On 29 January, he wrote another column, headlined ‘Stop thinking like it’s 2003 — toppling Iran’s mullahs does not risk mistakes of Iraq War’.

In this article he describes the Iraq war – which he cheered on – as a “debacle”, and argues that one reason for the disaster was Iran:

“The Iranian regime which moved into the vacuum that was created after the fall of Saddam Hussein — effectively turning Iraq into a vassal state of Iran.”

It is quite something to watch Murray concede that the Iraq war he supported became a strategic disaster for the West partly because it strengthened Iran – before immediately urging another war, this time against Iran itself.

Murray claimed Iran’s rulers “might have found the wrong adversary in this White House”, stated that the regime “is now teetering”, and concluded that it was now “over to Trump”.

Then came the war.

On 5 March, days after the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran, Murray wrote another column, headlined ‘Unlike past presidents, Trump delivered on his promise to eliminate our enemies’.

“Perhaps we forgot what it’s like when politicians act on their promises,” he declared triumphantly. “Perhaps our enemies forgot as well.”

While previous administrations had been strung along by Tehran, he claimed, “the revolutionary government in Iran got closer to the bomb. Well, not this time.”

He mocked the Iranians for perhaps becoming “used to weak and ineffectual foreign governments”, declaring:

“Now the regime in Iran has finally learned a lesson.”

It went on in that vein. “The ayatollahs decided to learn their lesson the hard way,” Murray wrote.

And then:

“To say that the radical terrorist regime in Iran is now weak and isolated is to vastly understate things.”

Amid talk of Kurdish fighters being armed – which also fed fears inside Iran that outside powers might seek to fragment the country – Murray declared:

“The remaining regime in Iran would be right to be panicking.”

And then how about this:

“Of course, there are many legitimate concerns that some Americans will have.

“They might fear that America is going to be dragged into some long-term conflict.

“But Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — among others — have made it very clear that this is going to be a short and limited war.”

What a revealing attitude to journalistic scepticism. Murray challenged fears about the duration of the conflict - based on the say-so of Donald Trump and his administration.

Then, on 12 March, came another article, headlined ‘Trump’s decision to fight Iran is historic — but he needs to finish the job’.

“People should be under no illusion,” he wrote. “The success of this American-led campaign has been extraordinary.”

He declared that Iran had “responded by doing one of the stupidest things imaginable”, claiming that its attacks were “a demonstration of weakness by the Iranian regime”.

He continued:

“Most of its missiles and drones have been shot down before they could hit their intended targets. Meaning that for no gain, this war is now pretty much the mullahs against everybody else.”

The hubris is extraordinary.

Iran inflicted devastating damage on US military facilities. Its attacks also inflicted huge economic costs on Gulf states allied to the West. The protracted war depleted US and allied interceptor stockpiles and other munitions, and Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz gave Tehran powerful economic leverage. The Gulf states have increasingly been forced to ask whether hosting US military bases protects their security – or instead leaves them exposed to attack.

Murray had concluded his 12 March piece:

“Trump rightly started this historic mission. And he’s the only person who will also be able to finish it — on America’s terms.”

Seven months later, the supposedly “short and limited war” is still going. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has inflicted huge costs on the global economy, while Iranian missile and drone attacks have exposed the vulnerability of American forces and allies across the Gulf.

Yet where is Murray’s humility after being proved so devastatingly wrong?

‘We must crush Iran now so it can’t come back and spread terror’ was the headline of a column on 9 April, in which he conceded that the objective of overthrowing the regime “has not been achieved”.

By 17 June, with Washington moving towards an agreement widely considered a capitulation to Iranian terms, Murray wrote a piece for The Free Press headlined ‘How Trump Fell Into the Iranian Trap’.

He now found “little reason for optimism”, bemoaning a proposed agreement that would give Iran billions of dollars in exchange for promises about its future conduct.

Nothing. Zero. Zilch about how he personally had been so wrong about a war - as one Foreign Policy article put it - was “a bigger defeat than Vietnam”.

Iraq: ‘the rightness of this conflict remains’

But here is a man who has been devastatingly wrong about war over and over and over again.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he described the anti-war movement - who would be horrifically vindicated – like this:

“They are gripers, whingers, riddled with the middle class’s imaginary guilt and in love with any culture not their own. They’ll go to their graves with their consciences intact and their world in tatters. They are shoddy thinkers, political children. They are, less sympathetically, the leaders of a horrible mob.”

In 2004, a year after the invasion, Murray insisted that “the rightness of this conflict remains”.

He also mocked one of the warnings made by opponents of the war: “the hundreds of thousands who would be killed”.

A peer-reviewed PLOS Medicine study in 2013 put the toll between 2003 and 2011 at an estimated 405,000 Iraqis dead who would otherwise have lived - nearer 461,000 once you count the families who had fled and so weren't there to be surveyed. Over 60% died violently. The rest died because the hospitals, water and sanitation that keep a country functioning had stopped working.

Then came 2005.

Asked whether he had changed his mind or learned any lessons, Murray said:

“The situation in Iraq as a whole is not perfect. We know that. But things are getting better and they will continue to get better because this is not bin-Laden-ish death-cultism, but freedom that is at work.”

“Not perfect.”

Iraq was already consumed by violence. And Murray’s confident insistence that “things are getting better and they will continue to get better” came shortly before Iraq descended into a full-scale sectarian bloodbath.

The occupation had institutionalised sectarian divisions from the very start - with catastrophic consequences.

And this was before the rise of ISIS, which seized huge areas of Iraq and spread into neighbouring Syria.

Far from “getting better”, the worst was to come.

Murray even wrote in the same piece:

“A sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians is getting bigger backing, and looks more promising, than any attempt for the best part of a decade.”

Well. I don’t have anything to add to that.

He concluded:

“I believe that Iraq will be seen in years to come as a justifiable deed which was done in 2003 – and not before – ‘because we could’.”

That is not, to put it mildly, how history remembers the Iraq war - or, as we’ll see, even Murray himself.

In his book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, Murray wrote of the British government’s conduct before the invasion:

“The government’s fault was not in ‘lying’ to the people, but in telling the people too much, revealing information that no previous government would have revealed, and, through this process, seriously compromising and embarrassing the security services.”

This was after Britain’s Butler Review had already identified major problems in how qualified intelligence assessments were presented in a far more confident public case for war. That included the loss of warnings about just how limited parts of the intelligence base actually were.

The later Chilcot Inquiry found that government statements repeatedly conveyed greater certainty than the underlying intelligence justified and failed to make its limitations sufficiently clear.

Murray’s book also discussed the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his network. He claimed of Iraq:

“By 2002 it was the only country in the world to assure them a warm and supportive welcome.”

That claim would be directly discredited by the conclusions of the US intelligence community. The 2006 US Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Saddam Hussein’s regime regarded him as an “outlaw” and “attempted unsuccessfully to locate him and capture him”, and that it “did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi and his associates.”

In the same book, Murray suggested that the Iraq war had triggered a democratic domino effect. “It is a Berlin Wall that has fallen,” he declared, adding:

“Those who deny that change is happening are looking more and more desperate.”

Yes, well. Who can forget the wave of democratisation that swept the Middle East!

Afghanistan: the ‘inevitable tragedy’

Let’s turn to Afghanistan.

In Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, Murray mocked people “who had to find out fast about a regime and a country of which they knew little”.

He wrote:

“Many waited for colleagues to say something that they could then repeat, which is why so many atrociously bad predictions about the Afghan conflict were echoed in such a short space of time – the ‘Afghan graveyard’, for instance, or the lethal ‘Afghan winter’ line. All foretold the hubristic undoing of the American army.”

So Murray mocked those warnings.

Then, in 2021, he wrote an article for UnHerd with the headline:

“America’s empires always fail: The withdrawal from Afghanistan was an inevitable tragedy.”

An inevitable tragedy!

Was it now?

Murray wrote:

“In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict.”

But it wasn’t simply “in hindsight”, was it?

Murray himself had ridiculed people who “foretold the hubristic undoing of the American army”. The broader warning – that Western hubris in Afghanistan could end in strategic failure – hardly needed hindsight after all.

He had accused them of knowing little about Afghanistan and the Taliban.

By 2021, however, Murray was pointing to mission creep, the unexpectedly porous borders with Afghanistan’s neighbours, and the West’s failure to build anything resembling a durable civil society.

Indeed, he now suggested that part of the problem was that Westerners did not understand Afghanistan properly – remarkably similar to the charge he had once thrown at opponents of the war.

Just take a look at this:

“Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.”

After all the disasters he’d cheered on, Murray seemed to finally wash his hands of foreign military adventurism.

That was five years before the next war Murray would enthusiastically cheer on: the war with Iran.

And here Murray does straightforwardly acknowledge that he had been wrong:

“After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions.”

And then:

“Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or ‘operational ease’. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started.”

Except he did not, in fact, get off the train.

Note even in this mea culpa how he immediately frames much of the failure in terms of America lacking the will, knowledge and staying power to see its interventions through.

Libya: ‘Time’s up, chaps. Game over.’

And then there’s Libya.

After the uprising began in February 2011, Murray wrote:

“With Libya, as with Iran, when a real enemy started looking fragile, America and her European allies decided not to push too much.”

He declared that “the leaders of the free world should have only one message”:

“Any people anywhere who desire to overthrow a dictatorship to have genuine representative governance will find us on their side.”

And he concluded:

“The days of Gadhafi and the mullahs are over. Time’s up, chaps. Game over.”

Yet later that year, after the intervention, doubts were creeping in. Murray worried that:

“It will be far harder to justify the Libyan intervention should it transpire that Nato merely facilitated an Islamist takeover.”

A little late.

In 2012, Murray signed a letter urging then prime minister David Cameron to support military measures in Syria, invoking Libya as a positive precedent.

The following year, he suggested that the war in Libya had done “more good than harm”.

What actually happened to Libya?

It became a failed state. Rival governments and militias fought for territory and power. Civil war followed. Jihadist organisations including ISIS exploited the collapse. Human trafficking flourished, migrants were subjected to horrific abuse, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and the country became a major route for migration across the Mediterranean.

This isn’t some partisan interpretation invented after the event. Britain’s own parliamentary inquiry into the intervention concluded that the policy had drifted from a “limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.”

The result, they declared, was “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”

Libya, in other words, became part of the very migration crisis which Murray would go on to denounce so passionately.

And yet in 2025 he told Joe Rogan:

“The Libyan intervention, I was pretty iffy about at the time.”

Really?

That is not how he sounded when he was declaring:

“The days of Gadhafi and the mullahs are over. Time’s up, chaps. Game over.”

So where are the apologies?

Where are the Douglas Murray apologies?

In The Strange Death of Europe, he casually writes:

“Yet whenever our governments and armies got involved in anything in the name of these ‘human rights’ – Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 – we seemed to make things worse and ended up in the wrong.”

Really?

That is quite a throwaway admission after being so extraordinarily confident – and so contemptuous of those who warned what could happen.

In a 2023 interview with Lawrence Krauss, Murray called Iraq “such a disaster in the end”, said he did not think much had been achieved and spoke of “terrible hubris”, including the feeling among “many of us” that Afghanistan had not been sufficient revenge for 9/11.

And so let me quote Douglas Murray one final time.

Back in 2005 – not long after the Iraq invasion – he denounced those who “blame what goes wrong on the US, and deny it credit for anything going right”.

There were “careers to be made in this school of politics”, he wrote, adding:

“Unlike governments, you never get held responsible when you’re wrong.”

Well.

That is certainly true of Murray, isn’t it?

Despite being so wrong – so unbelievably, catastrophically wrong – he has not been held responsible.

Everyone gets things wrong. Of course they do.

But there is being wrong, and then there is being repeatedly, spectacularly wrong about the most consequential question imaginable: war and peace, and the decision to unleash violence on other societies.

If you are wrong about one war, that should provoke some profound soul searching.

But if over more than two decades you repeatedly champion wars and ridicule those who warn about the consequences while you confidently predict success? What if then, when each catastrophe arrives, you quietly reposition yourself as someone who recognised the folly all along?

These wars unleashed hideous suffering, chaos, displacement and death.

So here is the question.

If you can be this wrong, this often, about something this important – why should anyone listen to you on war ever again?