What President Donald Trump has done in the Middle East has not only failed, but has made things worse, said one former defense intelligence expert.
Retired Maj. Harrison Mann, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official, and Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, both agreed that Trump has bungled his Iran war.
Mann specifically pointed to the recent decision to strike Kharg Island as part of Trump's ongoing threat of a ground invasion of Iran.
"That's why you'd need to take care of the fortifications on the island to as preparatory strikes to land troops. This is something the administration has been threatening threatening for weeks now," Mann explained. "I've said before, it would be a suicide mission."
He cited the huge effort that the U.S. had to deploy to simply get one soldier back who had ejected from a downed plane over Iran.
"Think about getting an 800-man battalion out of there after you've landed them," said the major. "So why this might be a threat, I think, compared to the infrastructure strikes that the administration is playing with, this is something the Iranian regime might welcome."
Mann explained that he left the military out of fear he would be "implicated in war crimes." That said, he believes the U.S. has already crossed that line.
"From hitting schools, some by accident, but there's also been dozens of universities bombed [and] medical facilities. The bridge that Trump bombed last week with the express intent not of achieving a military purpose, which theoretically could have made it legal, but to pressure the Iranian government," Mann continued.
On Tuesday morning, Trump threatened to wipe out "a whole civilization" if Iran doesn't meet Trump's demands.
"If that happened here, we would call that terrorism," Mann said. "We would know it was a war crime. And so something that has worried me from even before this war started, is how the Trump administration is putting more and more senior officers and troops at every rank in the position where they have to either disobey an order, which is an extremely difficult thing to do, even if it's a patently unlawful order, or prosecute war crimes or otherwise break the law."
He sent a message to the other officers, asking them to think really hard" about how they want to look back on these years of their career and if they are willing to do the right thing now "or live with the stain that a lot of my colleagues do and potentially face Leavenworth in 2029."
Leavenworth is where the military prison is. He noted that Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) has already threatened "accountability" for anyone in the military who breaks the law.
Both men agreed that hitting non-military targets would be a war crime, even if there is evidence that the military also uses a bridge. Trump has already made it clear that this is different.
"The kind of mass force that the president is threatening doesn't seem to qualify for every bridge, every railway station — don't seem to qualify as legitimate military targets," Cook said.
Iran called on its people to form human chains around those civilian targets, which Cook said makes a kind of "human shield" to ensure that there is no ambiguity that the military members carrying out Trump's orders must kill civilians.
"It strikes me that the president does not care, and he will give the order anyway, and that people are going to suffer as a result," Cook added.
The other problem it causes, he said, is that Iran wants desperately to be liberated from the regime. If Trump begins to kill civilians, however, it might change where they stand.
While Iran has agreed to nix the nuclear program, Mann said he doesn't ever see them willing to disarm themselves entirely.
"Unfortunately, I think some kind of unilateral U.S. disengagement is probably the best option because what we've done with this war is teach Iran that they had this power that they were afraid to use in the past, which was controlling basically the global economy and dominating this waterway, which which I got to reiterate, was something they were afraid to experiment with before we put them in this position," Mann explained.
Iran is already ensuring it has formal control and will begin charging a toll, "which they're already doing," Mann said. "Maybe we can talk them down from that position. But I think it's not realistic to expect things, going back to the status quo ante. Unfortunately."
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