President Donald Trump may be planning on sending ground troops to Iran, at least according to a popular right-wing pundit with whom Trump is reportedly in regular contact.
"Why would we need troops on the ground?” Fox News host Mark Levin said on a Saturday episode of his program regarding the questions Trump asks himself about this conflict. “Well, there's a lot of reasons—and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them. It's this uranium.”
Levin added that it would be justified if the White House sent “specialized” US ground troops to Iran to obtain Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium. Shortly before Levin made these arguments, Trump urged members of the public to listen to his Saturday broadcast. In his Truth Social post, Trump argued that Levin would explain “the importance of hitting Iran, HARD.”
At the same time that Levin made these claims, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, hoping that Special Forces and infantry troops could jointly carry out the ground invasion without turning it into a much wider war. Yet Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, told Newsweek that locating and removing this uranium even with ground troops would be "very challenging."
Sam Stein, editor of the conservative publication The Bulwark, spoke with Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller earlier this month about Iran hacking the email account of FBI Director Kash Patel — and in the process explained how this incident epitomizes the problems with Trump’s Iran war.
“… [W]e picked the time of this war and yet simultaneously the FBI fired their Iranian experts and then a week after that the FBI director gets hacked and embarrassing pictures of him bro-ing out and being all faded in Cuba are released by Iranian hackers,” Miller, a former Republican speechwriter, told Stein. “It just it makes us look like we're losers and the B team and this is pathetic and embarrassing and that is a real issue for these guys.”
He added, in terms of the purpose of the war, “Nobody understands why we're doing this. There's no point. They can't offer a coherent explanation for why they're doing it. There's no material benefit to the U.S. Nobody felt materially threatened by Iran. And so now it's just like these embarrassments.”
Similarly military historian Bret Devereaux, a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, published a lengthy analysis of the war earlier this month warning that the Iran war could become a “trap.”
“Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’” Devereaux argued, “not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran—but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.”
