Pakistan, April 21 -- In a 2025 interview with Time magazine, President Donald Trump asserted that Iraq and Iran were essentially the "same power" that had fought each other "for a thousand years under different names," a claim that reflects an absolutely superficial understanding of the region's history for a leader contemplating confrontation with one of its major states. The statement compresses totally different historical perspectives into a single self-serving narrative.

Although Iraq sits on the land of some of the world's oldest civilizations, including the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian societies of ancient Mesopotamia, those civilizations did not survive as a continuous political or cultural identity into the modern era. Ov...