Things aren’t going well with the war on Iran, six months after President Donald Trump commenced Operation Epic Fury at the urging of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu and his Mossad director painted a rosy scenario in which a combined U.S.-Israeli air campaign would quickly topple the weakened Iranian regime. Enamored by the success of the January raid to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, Trump decided to roll the dice.
It hasn’t worked out. Instead, the war has been stuck in a strange stalemate. What happens next?
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Well, Trump’s constant refrain that Iran has been defeated militarily, that Tehran has no navy or air force left, may be true in a technical sense. Iran indeed has hardly any air or naval power remaining after months of precision U.S. military strikes. Yet, with the regime now dominated by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hardliners, Iran has reveled in holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage. This outcome, which was anticipated by every Iran war game the Pentagon held over the last couple of decades — I participated in several of them — somehow surprised Trump.
Along comes Mark Levin, Fox News’s super-hawk, to tell the president what needs to be done. On Tuesday, Levin posted a screed on X offering his usual talking points:
“It was inevitable. More and more people are coming around to my position re the Iranian regime: finish the military operation that was so spectacular in the early weeks of the war; stop sidelining our best and most loyal ally, Israel, which has a lethal military and intelligence service; destroy Kharg Island and all other critical economic infrastructure and vital targets (they can all be rebuilt, over time, once the regime is eliminated); and, train/arm the Iranian people as one of the most effective means for overthrowing the Islamist-terrorist regime (the Reagan Doctrine).”
From there, Levin rants more about the perfidy of the “Islamist-terrorist regime” in Tehran and the moral imperative of defeating it, while stating “duh” a lot and lambasting the “Woke Right” for not wanting total war in the Middle East. Levin concludes, “We need to finish this. And we have the enemy just where we want them.”
This is the strategic equivalent of “more cowbell.” Levin’s counsel is so detached from geopolitical reality that it’s tempting to dismiss it as mere ravings. However, Levin, a lawyer-turned-pundit, inexplicably has Trump’s ear. In turn, his arguments cannot be ignored. Fortunately, they are very easily rebutted.
Take Levin’s opening broadside. First, if Operation Epic Fury was truly “spectacular” at the outset, why didn’t it work out as planned? It was Netanyahu’s delusions, grounded in the ardent desire to get the major war against Iran that he has craved for decades, that got us here in the first place. Doubling down on Netanyahu’s leadership is a poor recipe for extricating America from this war. Similarly, Israeli espionage targeting the United States (which Levin denies even occurs, but every U.S. counterintelligence officer knows is real) contradicts Jerusalem’s status as our “most loyal” ally.
Moreover, while the Israeli military is superb in many areas, it is very modest in capability compared to the U.S. military. Mossad’s once-stellar reputation has been tarnished by its empty promises that the Tehran regime would quickly collapse. Notably, Israeli military intelligence did not agree with Mossad’s false promises, assessing that toppling the Islamic regime would take one year, perhaps three. Netanyahu apparently didn’t tell Trump this in their fateful February meeting in the White House Situation Room.
Then there’s Levin’s call for destroying Kharg Island. That hasn’t been done because it would risk Iranian state collapse and a humanitarian crisis. If “arming the Iranian people” represented a panacea, that too would have come to pass months ago. As with the CIA’s failed effort to arm elements of the Syrian resistance, generating a resistance movement is very risky, expensive, and time-consuming. The simple truth is that, while the Guard-run junta is unpopular with the Iranian people, no population on Earth feels warmly toward foreigners who are bombing them. Punitive military action and covert action cannot win this war alone.
The harder truth?
There are no palatable military solutions to the war. Unleashing nuclear weapons is not on the table (Levin has hinted that we need to nuke Iran). Nor are “boots on the ground” possible, given how unpopular Trump’s war of choice is with the public. Any serious regime-change war, Operation Persian Freedom, if you like, would require the entire strength of the U.S. Army, active and reserve, to execute with success. Iran has twice the population of Iraq and is more than three times larger in area, much of it covered by mountains. Victory would require a long-term occupation of Iran by hundreds of thousands of American troops. Few, if any, allies would help.
That is the reality we face. The Pentagon is running out of precision munitions at an alarming rate due to Epic Fury, and most of these cannot be replenished quickly. U.S. military morale is showing signs of deterioration due to extended deployments for the war. If China makes a move on Taiwan, or Russian President Vladimir Putin attacks a NATO country — or worse, both occur simultaneously — our once-mighty military will be too overstretched to resist effectively.
Put simply, don’t listen to Levin.
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The notion that his rants represent the “Reagan Doctrine” is the opposite of the truth. President Ronald Reagan was a genuine man of peace. When the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut was blown up on Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. military personnel who were serving as peacekeepers in Lebanon, Reagan knew quickly that the suicide bomber responsible was a Guard terrorist, thanks to signals intelligence from the National Security Agency. Reagan ordered the Pentagon to drop some bombs on Guard training camps in Lebanon but otherwise demurred from retaliation against Tehran, fearing a wider war. Reagan would want peace with Iran now, too.
But he would never have been foolish enough to unleash this war in the first place.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
