No. of Recommendations: 5
They're doing that now.
And we want them to stop. It's hard to see how seizing Kharg gets them to stop. It doesn't reduce their capacity to close the strait or fire missiles and drones at energy infrastructure in the region. The theory seems to be that if we seized Kharg they would finally give up and remember that "they've been conquered," as Trump put it today. But if they don't, then we've got servicemen stuck a few miles from the Iranian coast.
Then after the kids are rescued, go all Raymond Reddington on him.
But we can't rescue the kids (open the Straits or stop Iran from attacking regional energy infrastructure). Or go all Raymond Reddington. To do that, we would need to launch a large-scale ground troop invasion of Iran. Which we're not going to do. Kharg is a hopeful "baby-split" - something we can do with a small number of ground forces in hopes that it gets Iran to capitulate. But there doesn't seem to be any great likelihood that would work.
That's the choice Trump made early on. You don't have to spend the political capital and time to get a lot of public buy-in for your military action, build a coalition of allies for broad base cover, and bring Congress along so that everyone is stuck on the record as being okay with what you're doing. You can just go ahead and commence kinetic operations.
But if you don't do the work upfront, there's only so far you can actually go - there's an upper bound to how high you can escalate. An Iraq-style invasion is off the table for you. So you really are betting the entire thing on an assumption that your opponent won't go all the way to the mat - that you can either destroy them or get them to capitulate short of an Iraq-style invasion. Unfortunately, your opponent knows it, so they just have to outlast what you can throw at them - and if they do, they can wait until you have to capitulate.
