The Iran War’s Central Mystery

When Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine stood side by side at their March 4 briefing on the Iran war, they each offered what they called the mission’s clear, decisive objectives.
…

“Iran is just a military operation,” Trump said when asked on Tuesday about his foreign policy priorities.But without a long-term diplomatic strategy, any military successes will be overshadowed by failure to secure a regime in Iran willing to forgo its nuclear ambitions and surrender its existing material, says retired CENTCOM deputy commander Adm. Robert Harward. Notably, in his first public remarks after the attack on Iran, Hegseth declared, “This is not a so-called regime change war.”

“If it’s not a regime change, then we’ve just exacerbated the problem,” Harward told MS NOW. “We’ve got a short-term military success that’s going to be a longer-term political problem.” 

Harward said ensuring Iran never has a nuclear weapon is a “whole-of-government objective” that requires military victory in eradicating the country’s missile and drone program and threat to sea navigation to set the conditions for a new government. “This is a political solution, because you can only achieve so much through military force,” Harward said.

Neither Trump nor his lieutenants have ruled out the prospect of U.S. forces on the ground in Iran. Asked on Tuesday if he was afraid of the Iranian regime warning that deploying U.S. troops would turn into another Vietnam, the president was unfazed. “I’m really not afraid of anything,” Trump said.

Harward said that while there are other ways to enact regime change with U.S. government support that do not translate to troop deployments, a limited approach to meet a defined objective, such as sending troops to Kharg Island to signal “to the Iranian people it’s time for the leadership to go,” could work.

“If that’s to get that tipping point where the army, the navy flips and they think the U.S. is there to ensure they’re not murdered by the IRGC, then that can be a sound strategy,” he said, referring to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.