Dissecting the history of Israel since is creation in 1948 and the never ending wars that are a product of creating a western/European state in the the midst of the Arab and Muslim World. An excellent video.
Saturday, March 28, 2026
VIETNAM, AFGHANISTAN, AND THE 2026 IRAN MEAT GRINDER: WHY OWNING THE SKY IS A DEATH TRAP
The author lives in Georgia. I am sharing for the interest of the readers. I am not familiar with the author but it's a very interesting piece.
VIETNAM, AFGHANISTAN, AND THE 2026 IRAN MEAT GRINDER: WHY OWNING THE SKY IS A DEATH TRAP—AND HOW THIS WAR WILL END AN EMPIRE
by Mark A. Shryock
on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/MarkShryockArtist
The history of modern warfare is defined by a persistent, expensive, and often fatal misunderstanding: the belief that controlling the sky is equivalent to winning a war. As the conflict with Iran intensifies in March 2026 (Reuters; The Guardian, March 2026 reporting), the United States is once again confronting the reality that air dominance is a tool for destruction, not a guarantee of victory. This was first etched into the American military consciousness during the Vietnam War and later reinforced during two decades of occupation in Afghanistan (RAND Corporation; SIGAR Reports). In both instances, the U.S. maintained overwhelming or absolute aerial superiority, yet failed to achieve its ultimate strategic objectives. To understand why air dominance might not matter at all in a conflict with Iran, one must look at the brutal intersection of historical failure, massive geography, and a military structure designed specifically to survive an air campaign.
The failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan provide the blueprint for why air power is a limited tool. In Vietnam, the U.S. held air supremacy over the South but faced a sophisticated, Soviet-backed Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) in the North. Between 1962 and 1973, the U.S. lost approximately 3,744 fixed-wing aircraft across all services to combat and operational causes in Southeast Asia (U.S. Air Force Historical Studies Office; Congressional Research Service; Air & Space Forces Magazine). Despite the massive tonnage of explosives dropped during operations like Linebacker II, air power could not break the political will of the North or permanently sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Army University Press). The canopy of the jungle and the decentralization of the enemy's logistics meant that the roof of the war was owned by the U.S., but the ground belonged to the North. Afghanistan was an even purer example of this failure. For twenty years, the U.S. held 100% air supremacy against an enemy with no air force and no radar. Yet, the Taliban simply used the terrain to wait out the clock (SIGAR). Air power is excellent at destroying static targets, but it cannot govern a population, stop a decentralized insurgency, or hold a street corner (RAND Corporation). It proved that you can own the 1% of the world that is the sky and still lose the 99% of the world that is the ground.
Iran, however, presents a challenge that dwarfs both Vietnam and Afghanistan due to its sheer scale and fortress geography. While Afghanistan is often cited as the ultimate mountain challenge because 75 to 80 percent of its land is mountainous, Iran is so much larger that its total mountain territory is nearly double that of Afghanistan (CIA World Factbook; Encyclopaedia Iranica). Iran covers approximately 1.65 million square kilometers, compared to Afghanistan's 652,230 square kilometers (CIA World Factbook). This means that while Iran is only 55% mountainous, it possesses roughly 906,000 square kilometers of jagged, defensible peaks—the Zagros and Alborz ranges—compared to Afghanistan's 521,000 square kilometers (derived from CIA/academic geographic data). These mountains act as a natural barrier that an invading force must breach just to reach the central plateau.
[IMAGE: Zagros Mountains landscape showing snow-capped peaks and valley approaches. Photo credit: Alireza Javaheri, CC BY 3.0]
Furthermore, Iran has spent decades boring into this granite. Reports from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Alma Research Center (2026 underground infrastructure assessments) confirm that Iran's missile cities and command centers are deeply buried in hardened rock, in some cases reported at extreme depths approaching hundreds of meters. Coalition air dominance can destroy the entrances to these tunnels, but even the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator struggles to reach assets buried under such depth (U.S. Department of Defense; Boeing technical data). You can't see through 500 feet of granite from an F-35.
The human element of the Iranian defense is equally daunting. Iran maintains a standing force of over one million personnel, divided between the regular army (Artesh) of 350,000, the elite Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) of 190,000, and the Basij paramilitary which has 300,000 active members and a mobilization capacity of millions (International Institute for Strategic Studies – Military Balance 2026; CSIS). This force is organized under a Mosaic Defense doctrine, which has divided the country into 31 autonomous commands (Small Wars Journal; CSIS analysis). As of the start of the 2026 campaign, these units have the authority to fight independently if the central leadership in Tehran is neutralized. This means that an air campaign designed to decapitate the government would simply result in 31 separate, well-armed wars across a million square kilometers of mountain and desert.
[IMAGE: NASA Space Shuttle photograph showing the folded ridge structure of the southern Zagros Mountains. The parallel lines of enormous hogback ridges and deep intervening valleys demonstrate the terrain that enables decentralized warfare. NASA photo STS047-151-35, public domain]
Air power cannot track or neutralize a million soldiers who are dispersed into small, autonomous units that are largely shielded by the radar shadows of the Zagros Mountains.
The tactical reality of the Strait of Hormuz turns the concept of air dominance into a liability. The Strait is a narrow chokepoint 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point, through which roughly 20% of the world's oil flows (U.S. Energy Information Administration). The Zagros Mountains sit directly on the northern edge of this channel, providing Iran with a crow's nest for surveillance and a wall for hiding mobile anti-ship cruise missiles (U.S. Naval War College analysis). Iran's strategy here is one of swarming and saturation. They utilize large numbers of small fast-attack boats and low-cost suicide drones in repeated waves to overwhelm the sophisticated Aegis defense systems of U.S. Navy ships (ISW; Reuters reporting, March 2026). Confirmed reporting shows hundreds of drones used in single waves and over 1,000 drones launched within 48-hour operational windows, with more than 2,000 deployed across the theater (The Guardian; ISW; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 2026). Even with absolute air dominance, a pilot cannot hit 500 small boats and thousands of drones across compressed engagement windows in such a cramped space. When combined with the thousands of naval mines Iran has deployed—which air power is virtually useless at clearing (U.S. Naval War College)—the Strait becomes a kill zone that threatens the global economy regardless of who owns the sky. If just one tanker hits a mine, insurance rates skyrocket and the global economy takes a gut punch (Reuters; global shipping insurance data trends, March 2026).
Ancient and medieval history proves that the Iranian plateau is a trap designed to bleed an invader dry. Alexander the Great, despite his superior tactics and "high-tech" engineers, faced a nightmare in the Iranian heartland. In 330 BC, a small Persian force estimated at 700 to 2,000 men used the narrow mountain pass known as the Persian Gates to hold off Alexander's army of 10,000 to 17,000 troops for approximately one month using terrain advantage and enfilade attacks (Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander; Encyclopaedia Britannica; modern historical analysis).
[IMAGE: Ancient stone-paved road through narrow mountain pass in Iran. This terrain demonstrates the type of defensible chokepoint that has trapped invading armies for millennia. Photo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0]
Alexander eventually won only by maneuver and local guidance; he was absorbed by the land rather than conquering it outright in a single campaign phase. When the Arab armies invaded in the 7th century, the mountains forced them to fight a separate war for every single province, taking over 20 years to control the plateau (Cambridge University Press historical studies). Even then, the Iranians ended up running the Arab empire within a century (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The
Mongols similarly struggled in the jagged Alborz and Zagros mountains, and like the Arabs before them, they eventually became Persianized, with their rulers adopting Persian administrative and cultural systems (Cambridge; Britannica).
The last time Iran was fully occupied was in 1941, during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran (Encyclopaedia Britannica; historical archives). While the Shah surrendered quickly to save his cities, the occupation triggered severe economic disruption, including inflation spikes and food shortages that led to unrest and bread riots (historical economic analyses of the 1941–1943 occupation period). The Allies withdrew by 1946 due to mounting cost and pressure.
THE KHARG ISLAND TRAP: WHY OCCUPATION IS A DEATH SENTENCE
As of late March 2026, the United States is confronting the exact trap that history has laid before every invader of the Iranian plateau. On March 13, 2026, U.S. forces conducted a large-scale precision bombing raid on Kharg Island, Iran's most critical oil export hub, which handles approximately 90 percent of the country's crude oil exports (NPR, March 14, 2026; Wikipedia: 2026 Kharg Island attack). The strikes destroyed more than 90 military targets including naval mine storage facilities, missile bunkers, air defenses, radar installations, and the island's airport, but deliberately spared the oil infrastructure (U.S. Central Command; SOF News, March 15, 2026; RealClearDefense, March 14, 2026). President Trump announced the strikes and warned that if Iran continued to interfere with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, he would "immediately reconsider this decision" not to destroy the oil facilities (Washington Post, March 13, 2026; NPR, March 14, 2026).
Within days of the bombing, reports emerged that the administration was considering a ground occupation of the island. On March 20, 2026, Axios reported that Trump was "considering blockading or occupying the island in an effort to force Iran to allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz" (Axios, March 20, 2026; Wikipedia: 2026 Kharg Island attack). The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli were ordered to the Middle East, with the MEU specializing in amphibious landings, embassy security, and evacuation operations (RealClearDefense, March 14, 2026; Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2026). A White House official told the BBC that "the United States Military can take out Kharg Island at any time," while adding that Trump had "no current plans to send troops" but "retains all options as Commander-in-Chief" (Wikipedia: 2026 Kharg Island attack).
Kharg Island is the contemporary expression of every historical lesson in this piece. The island itself is tactically holdable. It sits 15 to 20 miles off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, small enough to secure with a Marine Expeditionary Unit, and its military infrastructure has already been degraded by U.S. airstrikes (Wikipedia: 2026 Kharg Island attack; SOF News, March 15, 2026). American forces could land, dig in defensive positions, and control the perimeter. Air dominance over the island is absolute. But holding Kharg does not solve the strategic problem that this war has created, and in fact, it transforms U.S. forces into sitting targets for the exact asymmetric warfare documented throughout this piece.
The island is within range of Iranian missile, drone, and small-boat attacks launched from the mainland. As documented earlier in this analysis, Iran has demonstrated the capacity to launch hundreds of drones in single waves and over 1,000 drones within 48-hour windows, with more than 2,000 deployed across the theater (The Guardian; ISW; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 2026). Every supply ship approaching Kharg, every helicopter resupply mission, every Marine on that island becomes a target for swarm attacks from forces operating out of the Zagros Mountains visible from the shoreline. The U.S. Navy has already lost minesweepers from the region, and France's Exail company has offered to deploy 40 unmanned mine countermeasure systems just to clear the approaches (Armada International, March 2026). The Marines would be defending a static position against an enemy using mobile launch platforms hidden in mountainous terrain that air power cannot effectively suppress.
More critically, holding Kharg does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Even if U.S. forces occupy the island and control its oil export terminals, the tankers still have to transit the 21-nautical-mile-wide chokepoint that Iran has mined, swarmed with suicide drones and fast-attack boats, and overlooks from the Zagros range with mobile anti-ship missiles (U.S. Energy Information Administration; U.S. Naval War College). Controlling the island does not neutralize the 31 autonomous Iranian commands dispersed across a million square kilometers of defensible terrain. It does not stop the decentralized forces that continue to operate independently even if Tehran's central leadership is destroyed. It does not force Iran to negotiate, because the strategic equation remains unchanged: the U.S. can destroy infrastructure from the air, but it cannot hold ground against a dispersed, mobilized defense without bleeding resources at an unsustainable rate.
Kharg Island is Alexander's Persian Gates in miniature. The U.S. can take the position with superior firepower, but holding it requires defending a narrow, exposed piece of real estate under constant attack from forces operating out of terrain that dominates the surrounding area. Alexander did not try to occupy the Persian Gates after his flanking maneuver; he passed through and kept moving because static defense in that environment is a death sentence. The difference is that the U.S. cannot "keep moving" in this war. There is no Persepolis to sack, no central capital whose fall ends the conflict. The Iranian defense is designed to survive exactly this kind of campaign, and Kharg Island is the bait in a trap that turns American technical superiority into a strategic liability.
As of March 27, 2026, U.S. and Israeli operations have struck more than 15,000 targets across Iran (Global Defense Corp, March 27, 2026; corroborated reporting from Reuters and WSJ), yet the Strait remains contested and restricted and Iranian forces remain entrenched and operational (Reuters; ISW, March 2026). Senator Lindsey Graham stated that "he who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war" (Tatsu Ikeda, Substack analysis, March 2026). But control is not the same as victory, and occupation is not the same as strategic success. The United States controls Kharg Island's airspace. It has demonstrated the ability to destroy its military infrastructure at will. But the moment American boots hit that ground and try to hold it, those troops become fixed targets in a war where the enemy's entire doctrine is built around bleeding a technologically superior force through attrition, terrain advantage, and decentralized command.
The reason the 2026 campaign is a meat grinder is that we are trying to do with jets what Alexander, the Arabs, and the Mongols tried to do with swords, and we are hitting the same three problems: the high ground, the depth of the defense, and the unsustainable cost of winning. Air dominance is a prerequisite for the fight, but history and geography show it is far from a guarantee of victory. You can own the roof, but the guy in the basement has the shotgun, and the house is made of solid rock. Kharg Island is the proof that this logic still holds in 2026, and the decision to occupy or blockade it will determine whether the United States learns the lesson that every empire before it had to learn the hard way.
Copyright © Mark A. Shryock — May be shared with attribution.
SOURCES AND STRATEGIC ASSESSMENTS (MARCH 2026)
U.S. Air Force Historical Studies Office
Congressional Research Service
Air & Space Forces Magazine
RAND Corporation
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction
CIA World Factbook
Encyclopaedia Iranica
Institute for the Study of War
Alma Research Center
United States Department of Defense
International Institute for Strategic Studies (Military Balance 2026)
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Small Wars Journal
U.S. Energy Information Administration
U.S. Naval War College
Reuters (March 2026 reporting)
The Guardian (March 2026 reporting)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Cambridge University Press
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Arrian (Anabasis of Alexander)
NPR (March 14, 2026)
Wikipedia: 2026 Kharg Island attack
SOF News (March 15, 2026)
RealClearDefense (March 14, 2026)
Washington Post (March 13, 2026)
Axios (March 20, 2026)
Wall Street Journal (March 14, 2026)
Armada International (March 2026)
Global Defense Corp (March 27, 2026)
U.S. Central Command
Tatsu Ikeda (Substack analysis, March 2026)
IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS
Mountain pass photo: Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Zagros landscape photo: Alireza Javaheri, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
NASA Zagros orbital photo: NASA Space Shuttle mission STS047-151-35, public domain
Friday, March 27, 2026
Johnathan Cook: Does the tail wag the dog? How both sides are missing the bigger picture
Does the tail wag the dog? How both sides are missing the bigger picture
Binary thinking in the argument over whether the US or Israel is driving the illegal war on Iran obscures far more than it illuminates. The truth is the dog and the tail are wagging each other
Johnathan CookeMarch 27 2026
 |
From Johnathan Cook on Substack
The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?
One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.
The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.
Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.
But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.
They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.
Jonathan Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.
Addressing the Israeli parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”
A video from 2001 shows Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”
Former US President Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same. In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”
Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.
Messy arrangement
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.
I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.
What does that mean?
Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.
In fact, part of Israel’s job – the reason it is such an important client state – is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.
But the story is more complicated than that.
At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.
Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.
Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.
Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.
And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.
This makes for a very messy arrangement.
Disappearing Palestinians
The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel – rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests – becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.
It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria – as it is doing again right now.
After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.
It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused. As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.
But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.
Washington – first under Biden, then under Trump – gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons. Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.
The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests – so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.
What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza – short wrecking sprees – to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.
In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.
To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.
That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.
Israeli attack dog
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.
The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.
Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran – its only plausible rival in the region – being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.
But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick – threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey – and proffering a carrot – promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.
The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.
In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.
For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.
Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.
That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with John Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”. Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”
In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.
Weaving mischief
Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.
Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.
Instead Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather patently dangerous.
And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons – hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials – who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.
SubscribedEach recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran. I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.
Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.
In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result – an illegal war on Iran – is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.
Secret power
So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics – the President, the Congress, the Senate, the two main political parties – are the sole repositories of power in the system.
Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.
Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.
 |
This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.
But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.
Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.
That bureaucracy – sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex – doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.
It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby – AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others – what it did to Assange and Snowden.
It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.
The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.
The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.
But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran – an idea already seeping into popular consciousness – may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.
If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay – and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.
The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.
This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.
Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on Twitter and Facebook.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Ken Klippenstein: Is a Ground War With Iran Imminent, or Inevitable?
Is a Ground War With Iran Imminent, or Inevitable?
The answer is an unqualified 'No.'
Ken Klippenstein March 26 2026
If you watch or read the media, you would think that a “ground invasion” of Iran is “imminent” — either to land on Kharg Island, a five-mile speck that processes 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, or to take some coastal strip adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.
It is not imminent and not even inevitable.
Military sources tell me that for weeks, the Pentagon has exaggerated the readiness and potency of the Marines, setting in motion a media frenzy that is part stupidity, part disinformation to spook Tehran, and part manipulation to please Donald Trump.
“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island [Kharg],” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday. “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”
Sounds scary, right? Here’s the reality.
On March 13, headlines blared that the “three-ship” USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was ordered from Japan to the Middle East. Over the next week, news outlets across the globe literally tracked the supposed 2,200 Marines making their way moving west through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean.
In actuality, one of the three ships, the USS San Diego, never left Japan and is still there. And the other two ships, carrying just 1,500 fighters, are sitting at Diego Garcia, roughly 4,260 kilometers from Iran’s coastline.
And that second Marine Expeditionary Unit? Contrary to some reporting that said that the USS Boxer Group left Hawaii on March 19, it departed San Diego. It will have to cover approximately 22,200 kilometers to reach the region and wouldn’t be able to arrive until mid-April at the earliest. Navy sources in San Diego say it is still unclear to the unit itself whether it is headed for the Gulf or just moving to the Pacific to cover the departing Tripoli group.
Not exactly imminent!
And yet here’s NPR, implying an ominous military buildup:
“Between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have received written orders to deploy to the Middle East … The deployment, combined with two Marine Expeditionary Units already moving toward the Persian Gulf, could bring 6,000 to 8,000 U.S. ground troops into close proximity to Iran.”
CBS went even further, linking the 82nd Airborne explicitly to the “Iran war.”
CBS headline The 82nd is just a light infantry battalion. The idea that we’re going to parachute the 82nd for a ground invasion is absurd. We didn’t even do that at the height of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a good part of the entire U.S. Army was poised to strike Saddam. (And the 82nd made a near-identical movement in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.)
The 82nd has a quick reaction brigade to serve exactly as a “ready unit” to quickly deploy anywhere in the world, but CENTCOM sources tell me that with the majority of the brigade is in training in Louisiana and the battalion ‘on its way’ is going to perform a force protection role in the interim, waiting for you know who to decide to do something stupid.
Then there’s the “increase” in U.S. forces constantly being referred to, as if ground troops are building up in the Gulf or more and more aircraft are constantly flowing. But the truth is that almost all of what has augmented the forward deployed forces are maintenance, ordnance, and logistics to sustain a bombing campaign that started as a quick strike and is now extended to a weeks-long campaign for who knows how long.
That augmentation, if you believe the news media, includes a “Third Aircraft Carrier” on its way. “Third US aircraft carrier heads to region as Trump signals long war with Iran and demand for surrender,” YNet news reports.
There is a third carrier that is potentially ready, the USS George H.W. Bush, which could go to the Gulf, especially to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln, which is well overdue for rotation, but it is sitting in Virginia, with a liberal leave policy over Easter Week.
And even a second carrier? The USS Gerald Ford — the carrier that’s been bombing Iran from the Mediterranean Sea, has been in port at Souda Bay on Crete in Greece this week, not for combat operations but because it suffered a significant non-combat fire that originated in the ship’s laundry spaces. The blaze rendered more than 100 berthing spaces unusable and displaced several hundred sailors. The Ford isn’t projecting power toward Iran; it’s getting its laundry room repaired.
If you squint, an invasion seems inevitable. But look closer at the actual state of each force being cited, and a very different picture emerges. How is it possible, for instance, that every news organization from the New York Times on down, can report three ships leaving Japan with the Tripoli group when there were only two? Secrecy. Sloppiness. Sops.
With Trump in charge, one never knows. But even if there were a ground operation against Kharg Island, it would most likely involve Army Rangers and special operations forces, Green Berets and Navy SEALs — not some conventional ground assault à la Normandy. The idea of the U.S. Marines storming the beaches while the 82nd Airborne drops on parachutes from above is a cable news fever dream.
This frenzy echoes the panic after Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was arrested in January, when breathless coverage of military movements convinced many that a conventional U.S. intervention was hours away. It wasn’t.
The panic has even reached active-duty service members, several of whom have contacted me worried they were heading into ground combat.
It also reminds me of another media freakout Iran’s mining of the strait of Hormuz, giving the impression that Tehran had mined the entire passage. It later became clear that Iran either hadn’t mined anything at all or had only planted a few as a signal.
Which is what all of this is about, signaling to Iran. From the beginning of the bombing, signaling that the U.S. is serious this time, that the enemy will be given no quarter, etc. Then came the Marine and then the 82nd Airborne, and a third aircraft carrier, and threats of hell and damnation coming from the mouths of Trump and Hegseth.
It’s the White House’s prerogative to scare the shit out of the Iranian government. But does the media need to do that to the public?
SubscribedIf you watch or read the media, you would think that a “ground invasion” of Iran is “imminent” — either to land on Kharg Island, a five-mile speck that processes 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, or to take some coastal strip adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz.
It is not imminent and not even inevitable.
Military sources tell me that for weeks, the Pentagon has exaggerated the readiness and potency of the Marines, setting in motion a media frenzy that is part stupidity, part disinformation to spook Tehran, and part manipulation to please Donald Trump.
“We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island [Kharg],” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday. “We did Iwo Jima. We can do this.”
Sounds scary, right? Here’s the reality.
On March 13, headlines blared that the “three-ship” USS Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group, carrying the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was ordered from Japan to the Middle East. Over the next week, news outlets across the globe literally tracked the supposed 2,200 Marines making their way moving west through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean.
|
In actuality, one of the three ships, the USS San Diego, never left Japan and is still there. And the other two ships, carrying just 1,500 fighters, are sitting at Diego Garcia, roughly 4,260 kilometers from Iran’s coastline.
And that second Marine Expeditionary Unit? Contrary to some reporting that said that the USS Boxer Group left Hawaii on March 19, it departed San Diego. It will have to cover approximately 22,200 kilometers to reach the region and wouldn’t be able to arrive until mid-April at the earliest. Navy sources in San Diego say it is still unclear to the unit itself whether it is headed for the Gulf or just moving to the Pacific to cover the departing Tripoli group.
Not exactly imminent!
And yet here’s NPR, implying an ominous military buildup:
“Between 2,000 and 3,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division have received written orders to deploy to the Middle East … The deployment, combined with two Marine Expeditionary Units already moving toward the Persian Gulf, could bring 6,000 to 8,000 U.S. ground troops into close proximity to Iran.”
CBS went even further, linking the 82nd Airborne explicitly to the “Iran war.”
|
The 82nd is just a light infantry battalion. The idea that we’re going to parachute the 82nd for a ground invasion is absurd. We didn’t even do that at the height of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a good part of the entire U.S. Army was poised to strike Saddam. (And the 82nd made a near-identical movement in January 2020 after the assassination of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.)
The 82nd has a quick reaction brigade to serve exactly as a “ready unit” to quickly deploy anywhere in the world, but CENTCOM sources tell me that with the majority of the brigade is in training in Louisiana and the battalion ‘on its way’ is going to perform a force protection role in the interim, waiting for you know who to decide to do something stupid.
Then there’s the “increase” in U.S. forces constantly being referred to, as if ground troops are building up in the Gulf or more and more aircraft are constantly flowing. But the truth is that almost all of what has augmented the forward deployed forces are maintenance, ordnance, and logistics to sustain a bombing campaign that started as a quick strike and is now extended to a weeks-long campaign for who knows how long.
That augmentation, if you believe the news media, includes a “Third Aircraft Carrier” on its way. “Third US aircraft carrier heads to region as Trump signals long war with Iran and demand for surrender,” YNet news reports.
There is a third carrier that is potentially ready, the USS George H.W. Bush, which could go to the Gulf, especially to relieve the exhausted USS Abraham Lincoln, which is well overdue for rotation, but it is sitting in Virginia, with a liberal leave policy over Easter Week.
And even a second carrier? The USS Gerald Ford — the carrier that’s been bombing Iran from the Mediterranean Sea, has been in port at Souda Bay on Crete in Greece this week, not for combat operations but because it suffered a significant non-combat fire that originated in the ship’s laundry spaces. The blaze rendered more than 100 berthing spaces unusable and displaced several hundred sailors. The Ford isn’t projecting power toward Iran; it’s getting its laundry room repaired.
If you squint, an invasion seems inevitable. But look closer at the actual state of each force being cited, and a very different picture emerges. How is it possible, for instance, that every news organization from the New York Times on down, can report three ships leaving Japan with the Tripoli group when there were only two? Secrecy. Sloppiness. Sops.
With Trump in charge, one never knows. But even if there were a ground operation against Kharg Island, it would most likely involve Army Rangers and special operations forces, Green Berets and Navy SEALs — not some conventional ground assault à la Normandy. The idea of the U.S. Marines storming the beaches while the 82nd Airborne drops on parachutes from above is a cable news fever dream.
This frenzy echoes the panic after Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro was arrested in January, when breathless coverage of military movements convinced many that a conventional U.S. intervention was hours away. It wasn’t.
The panic has even reached active-duty service members, several of whom have contacted me worried they were heading into ground combat.
It also reminds me of another media freakout Iran’s mining of the strait of Hormuz, giving the impression that Tehran had mined the entire passage. It later became clear that Iran either hadn’t mined anything at all or had only planted a few as a signal.
Which is what all of this is about, signaling to Iran. From the beginning of the bombing, signaling that the U.S. is serious this time, that the enemy will be given no quarter, etc. Then came the Marine and then the 82nd Airborne, and a third aircraft carrier, and threats of hell and damnation coming from the mouths of Trump and Hegseth.
It’s the White House’s prerogative to scare the shit out of the Iranian government. But does the media need to do that to the public?
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)