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You would be shocked at what I did right before I wrote this.
Thirty minutes ago I published a blog arguing that a ground invasion was Trump’s only remaining option. Thirty minutes. That is how long it took me to talk myself out of my own headline.
I am leaving that post up. I am not going to hide it. (Read it here.) Because the process of changing my mind is the whole point of this one, and if I am going to ask you to think with me, I have to be willing to show you my work — including the parts I got wrong.
Here is what happened when I actually thought it through.
What I Was Really Reaching For
When I said Trump had no other choice, what I was actually reaching for was this: cripple Iran. Not occupy it. Cripple it.
There is a difference, and the difference is about forty thousand American lives and a decade of our future.
We are here because nobody wanted to confront the 800-pound gorilla of the Middle East after Saddam Hussein. And honestly? It is understandable. Nobody wanted to go back to war out there again. Between 9/11, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ISIS, Iran got a cover story for twenty straight years while everybody else was busy.
Okay. We get it. But now we are here anyway, and this time we have a very good reason. And it is a nuclear one.
How Dangerous Is Iran? Look at What We Already Did for Them
This is the part that hit me while I was researching, and I want you to sit with it.
In 2003, the Arab nations opened their doors. Kuwait was our staging ground. Qatar hosted the forward headquarters. Bahrain gave us the fleet. Saudi Arabia let us run the air war out of Prince Sultan. The whole neighborhood held the door open so America could go take out Saddam Hussein.
And who was Saddam Hussein? Iran’s worst enemy on planet Earth. The man who fought them for eight years and left a million people dead between the two countries.
We did that job. For free. We spent our own blood and our own treasure and we removed the single greatest threat to the Islamic Republic’s existence, and we handed them Baghdad on a platter.
So how did Iran say thank you?
They killed our soldiers.
The Pentagon’s own declassified assessment says at least 603 American service members were killed in Iraq by Iran-backed militants between 2003 and 2011. That is 17 percent of every American who died in that war. CENTCOM says Iranian explosively formed penetrators alone killed 196 Americans and wounded 861 more — and those EFP numbers are only a subset of the total. (Military Times has the reporting.)
Hundreds of our sons dead. Thousands wounded. From a country we had just done the biggest favor of their national life.
And we were not even a threat to them. Not militarily. We had no plans for Tehran. We were busy. We were stuck. And they hit us anyway, in the back, for eight straight years, with weapons built in their own factories.
The U.S. Army’s own official study of the Iraq War concluded that Iran appears to have been the only winner of it.
That is who you are talking about putting American teenagers on the ground against. A regime that will bleed you for a decade while you are actively doing them favors. So ask yourself what they will do when you are actually coming for their throat.
The Wildcard Everybody Is Forgetting: Iraq
Here is the thing I do not hear anybody talking about, and it is the reason a ground invasion is not just hard — it is a trap.
Iraq is in Iran’s pocket.
Not partially. Structurally. The Popular Mobilization Forces — the PMF — are roughly 60 to 70 brigades and about 230,000 personnel, running on an annual budget near $3.5 billion, and that money comes out of the Iraqi government’s own budget. These are not shadowy guys in a basement. They draw state salaries. They have legal status. They are an official arm of the Iraqi state.
And their core leadership answers to Tehran.
Kataib Hezbollah — the same outfit that was born in March 2003 out of our invasion — announced they were joining this war on day one. Their stated goal, in their own words, is to drag the United States into “a long war of attrition.” West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center published a study documenting unprecedented military integration between Iran’s IRGC and Iraqi militia elements across at least 36 major PMF units during this war. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed over 100 attacks. Iraq’s Kurdistan Region absorbed 196 drone and missile attacks in the first week alone.
But here is the fact that closes the case.
On March 28, 2026, Iran-backed Iraqi militias began mobilizing forces into Iran. Convoys were filmed on the road. They were later spotted at Khorramshahr, in southwestern Iran.
They are already crossing the border to fight for Iran. It is not a theory. It is on video.
And there is precedent — roughly 5,000 Iraqi Shia militants crossed into Iran through the Shalamcheh, Chazhabeh, and Khosravi crossings to help crush the protests, moving under the cover story of a pilgrimage to Mashhad.
So picture the ground invasion. You put American armor into western Iran. Behind you, to your west, sits a country of 230,000 state-funded fighters with a twenty-year grudge and open border crossings, whose most powerful factions have already announced they are in the fight and have already sent men across.
Iran came over the border to kill us in Iraq. What in the world makes anybody think Iraq will not come over the border to kill us in Iran?
That is not a flank. That is a knife in the back waiting to happen. And I have not even mentioned the terrain yet — Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq, 90 million people, with the Zagros mountains standing across the whole western approach like a wall God built on purpose. There is no flat desert for a thunder run to Tehran. There is no 2003 replay.
The IRGC will not surrender. These are hardened, radicalized, veteran fighters who have studied Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan specifically to be ready for us. Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Iranian forces are “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground.” They have already mined the likely landing sites.
When a man tells you he has been waiting twenty years for you to walk into his house, believe him.
And Then There Is the Small Matter of Where We Would Even Stand
Say we ignore all of that. Fine. Where do we stage?
Because staging an army is not a vibe. It is ports, rail, fuel farms, hospitals, and months of buildup on somebody else’s dirt — and somebody has to say yes.
Nobody said yes.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait quietly told Tehran before the war that they would not allow an attack on Iran from their soil. Saudi and Kuwait specified the ban covers support missions too — no refueling, no reconnaissance. Every Gulf government refused to let American forces launch attacks from their facilities. Riyadh’s refusal is what actually killed Project Freedom, the operation to escort shipping through Hormuz. Not diplomacy. A no.
Iraq? We finished withdrawing from Ain al-Asad in January and Baghdad announced the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from its federal territory. All we have left is Harir in Kurdistan, with a September exit date on it. Even Spain told us no on their air bases.
Meanwhile Iran has beaten our existing bases half to death — Al Udeid, Ali Al Salem, Prince Sultan, the Bahrain naval headquarters — rendered “all but uninhabitable,” with $800 million in damage in the first two weeks and our own people relocated to hotels.
There does not seem to be the diplomatic and geopolitical support for Trump to pull this off in the lounge at Trump Tower, let alone the Middle East.
The 2003 alliance architecture got tested and it came back no — from Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City, and Baghdad, all at once. That is the real story of this war and hardly anybody is writing it.
The Number One Reason: The American People Are Not Behind It
But I will be honest with you. Even if we solved the terrain, the militias, and the staging — I would still say no. And here is why.
74 percent of American voters oppose sending ground troops into Iran. Only 20 percent support it. That is Quinnipiac. (Full poll release here.)
And before anybody tells me that is just the Democrats talking — 52 percent of Republicans oppose it too. Reuters/Ipsos found only 7 percent of Americans back a large-scale ground war. Seven. Republican lawmakers started breaking ranks after classified briefings and said they would not support ground operations under any circumstances.
Now look. I do not mind the President taking action anyway. I have said that before and I will say it again. Sometimes leadership means moving before the crowd catches up.
But this is different. Mr. President — you need your credit with the American people and with the world. That credit is a finite resource and you are going to need it. Save it. Do not spend it all on Iran. Do what you can. Just do not mortgage the whole house on this one.
The Airpower Reality Check
Let me put some hard numbers on the table, because this is not free either.
The Congressional Research Service counted 42 U.S. aircraft lost or damaged in Operation Epic Fury as of May 13. Twenty-four MQ-9 Reapers gone. Four F-15E Strike Eagles down — and three of those were shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 in a friendly fire incident on March 1. An A-10 down. An F-35A took ground fire over Iran, the first known combat damage to a fifth-generation fighter. A KC-135 went down over western Iraq killing all six aircrew, and five more tankers were destroyed on the ground at Prince Sultan. An E-3 Sentry was hit sitting on an unprotected taxiway. (CRS report here.)
Here is my read, and I think it is the right one: that bleeding has been wisely mitigated since we resumed strikes. Look at the current target set — missile systems, coastal radar, naval capability, refineries and ports around the Strait. We are not sending crews deep into the interior anymore. We are hitting what is close, what is coastal, and what matters. That is smart. That is somebody learning.
Now the money. The Pentagon burned roughly $5.6 billion in munitions in the first 48 hours — more than 2,000 munitions against nearly 2,000 targets. The Pentagon’s operations cost estimate hit $29 billion by mid-May. The war’s cost to taxpayers hit $113.3 billion by June. And the administration just asked for another $87.6 billion.
Meanwhile our Patriot PAC-3, THAAD, and SM-3 interceptors have performed at almost 100 percent — and we are running out of them. The Pentagon is discussing invoking the Defense Production Act. You do not reach for Korean War emergency powers when the shelves are full.
We need to hit them hard and we need to leave. That is the Trump doctrine of war, and I think it is a great way to do it. Be decisive. Do not linger.
Two Doors. Pick One.
We go all in, knock them out, and leave.
Or we knock out the bridges and the oil installations and we leave.
What we cannot do is keep playing footsie with this regime. Standing around in the world’s most dangerous neighborhood trying to negotiate with people who have already broken a memorandum they signed at Versailles four weeks ago — that is not patience. That is exposure.
Trump has already named the target list: the bridges and the power plants. Add Kharg Island — the terminal that moves roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude. Level the IRGC’s ability to wage war. Level the Islamic Republic’s ability to terrorize the planet. Then go home.
We do not have to send our sons. That is an option. It is just a bad one.
The Prophetic Cedric Doctrine: Look Past Iran
Now here is the part almost nobody is factoring in, and it is why I think Trump moving on Iran was actually brilliant.
We are four years into a world at war. Russia invaded Ukraine and has been threatening the NATO alliance ever since — some would argue they have already been attacking it with drones over the past year. And while everybody is staring at Hormuz, a war pitting America against China and Russia may be right around the corner.
Venezuela and Iran are the warm-up.
He knows what is lurking. Get Venezuela off the table. Get Iran off the table. Clear the board before the real opponents sit down. That is not recklessness, that is sequencing. (I laid this out here — when I speak, people should listen.)
And that is exactly why you do not sink 200,000 Americans and ten years into the Zagros mountains. Because if you do, you will not have an army left when the actual fight arrives. China benefits from every month we are stuck. We have already pulled advanced missile defense out of the Indo-Pacific and moved it to the Middle East — which is to say we have already taken pressure off Beijing’s back. Russia has already gotten sanctions relief on its oil out of this energy shock.
A ground war in Iran is a gift. It is wrapped, it has a bow on it, and Xi and Putin are waiting by the tree.
But What About the Iranian People?
That is my only real concern in all of this, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
If we take the bridges, ordinary Iranians suffer. That is true and I will not dress it up.
But this is war. And the terrible arithmetic of war is that people suffer when their leaders are vicious. That is not American cruelty. That is the price of being ruled by men who would rather carpet bomb their own soil than let it be taken — men who have said as much.
And let me say something the whole world has earned.
The world has watched America do the dirty work. We kept Iran off a nuclear weapon. We took out their drone and ballistic missile threat. We are clearing the Strait of Hormuz. Trump calls himself the “guardian of the Strait,” which is hilarious, but somebody has to be it and it sure is not Europe.
Twenty million barrels a day move through that water. Europe drinks it. Asia drinks it. Nobody else will lift a finger.
So you want us to keep the world safe. You want us to patrol the oceans. You want us to keep your oil flowing. You want us to run up our own national debt doing it — $113 billion and counting — while you write op-eds about our restraint.
Forget all of that. Here is what we are going to do.
We are going to destroy the bridges. We are going to destroy Kharg Island. And then we are going to let China and Russia fix it up. Let Beijing help the Iranian people. Let Moscow help the Iranian people. Let the Arab nations help. Let Turkey help — they are good friends with the Iranians, let them all pitch in and rebuild.
We will be at home. Where our sons belong.
The Hard Truth About the Bomb
I will end with the thing I hate to say.
I think Iran is going to get a nuclear weapon.
Not because they beat us. Because we are not willing to go in and physically get the nuclear material — roughly 450 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium sitting near Isfahan — and nobody, not the American people and not the world, has the stomach to authorize that.
We seem to have decided we are okay with it.
And notice who is catching the heat. Most of the world is putting more pressure on Trump than on Iran. And if they are not pressuring him directly, they are doing it by refusing to put any support behind this at all. Silence is a position too.
So look — they are going to hate you anyway.
You might as well crash the party. They are going to be at your neck regardless, so you might as well cut them off at the knees on the way out the door.
Hit hard. Hit smart. Come home. And save your credit for the fight that is actually coming.
Make Something Happen.
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