No exit from the Iran quagmire - Max Boot

I don’t always agree with John Bolton, but I have a lot of respect for him. He’s been a foreign policy insider for decades, and a consistent advocate of hard-line positions. He was advocating regime change in Iran during the first Trump administration when that position was anathema to Trump and his MAGA toadies. Bolton is still advocating that position today, when it may (or may not be) the official position of the Trump administration.

Along the way he’s had a falling out with Trump, and he wasn’t afraid to criticize Trump even though he knew that the president would try to exact revenge. Sure enough: Trump’s Justice Department has indicted Bolton, but Bolton keeps on speaking his mind, whether Trump likes it or not. Such courage and consistency is rare in Washington; more common are opportunists like JD Vance and Pete Hegseth, who were anti-Trump and antiwar war before they became pro-Trump and pro-war.

So Bolton’s New York Times op-ed, “Finish the Job: How Trump Can Still Win in Iran,” is worth reading because it is likely to be the smartest statement of the hawkish position today. He is right to dismiss Trump’s ludicrous claims that regime change has already been achieved in Iran, and he is right that Trump cannot simply walk away from the war with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz—and therefore 20 percent of the world’s oil. Yet Bolton also lays out ridiculously ambitious objectives without any realistic means of achieving them.

He writes: “We must use the considerable momentum of the military to eliminate Iran’s ability to seize control not just of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz but also of the Red Sea and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait — and we must simultaneously continue to destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, including its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.” So Bolton suggests we destroy not only the IRGC—a force with as many as 195,000 military personnel—but also destroy the ability of the Houthis to threaten the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Good luck with that. The most likely way to achieve such ambitious objectives would be with a massive U.S. ground invasion of Iran, and presumably Yemen too. But that would require hundreds of thousands of troops, and would result in substantial U.S. casualties. That is obviously a nonstarter.

Continued https://open.substack.com/pub/maxboot/p/no-exit-from-the-iran-quagmire