Will There be a Ground Invasion of Iran? (w/ Col. Larry Wilkerson) | The Chris Hedges Report

As the US prepares to escalate the war on Iran with a potential ground invasion, Col. Wilkerson divulges the long reticence of US military planners to engage Iran, and the folly of such an endeavor.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

More than one month into the American-Israeli war on Iran, the US military has expended a significant amount of its arsenal and many billions of dollars without making any progress in meeting its illusory and often-changing objectives. As the White House and Pentagon, and the markets, panic, the United States has begun deploying troops and resources to the region in preparation for a possible ground assault. This raises significant questions about what type of campaign the US is capable of waging and whether, as analysts are saying, fighting the Iranian military on its own terrain would be a bloodbath for US troops. Would putting boots on the ground embroil the US in another prolonged quagmire, similar to other recent US wars in the region, that would end in defeat?

In this interview, Chris Hedges speaks with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War and who, during his long military career, served as Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell as well as director of military colleges. Wilkerson begins the conversation by framing the war on Iran as part of the US’ greater strategy to mitigate its declining ability to dominate world markets and counter China’s rise, especially China’s construction of new trade routes that are out of reach of the US.

Wilkerson describes how the US’ strategy is failing so far and how Iran’s calculated responses to the US-Israeli attacks have resulted in great losses for the US military, have already significantly altered geopolitical relationships, and are likely to result in a global depression. Both Hedges and Wilkerson express concern that as Israel becomes more desperate, it may launch a nuclear attack on Iran. That threat is now likely to push Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Wilkerson advises that the best path out of this potential quagmire is for the US to declare a victory and retreat — but he doubts that the Trump administration will have the wisdom to realize this. Nor does he believe that the administration has any real idea of why this war is being fought, acting instead as slaves to their “masters.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

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Transcript

Chris Hedges: The contradictory statements emanating from the Trump White House about the war on Iran are evidence of panic. This panic, caused by the inability to halt Iranian attacks, open the Strait of Hormuz, or cope with a mounting global financial crisis, means the Trump administration is now considering conducting ground operations, perhaps attempting to seize the Persian Gulf Islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs, Larek and Kharg Islands. The United States, has deployed the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, composed of about 3,500 sailors and Marines, in addition to transport and strike fighter aircraft, as well as amphibious assault and tactical assets. It has deployed the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group with about 2,500 Marines equipped with F-35B Lightning II Stealth Fighters, MV-22B Osprey, tilt rotors and attack helicopters. The US has also deployed 2,000 paratroopers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne and is reportedly considering augmenting these forces with another 10,000 troops. What will a ground attack look like? How risky will be air or amphibious assaults? Will these assaults result in large casualty rates? Can they force Iran to capitulate? Will they reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping?

What will such an assault, especially on Kharg Island, which lies 16 miles off Iran’s coast and processes 90 % of the country’s oil exports, mean for the global economy? Or will a ground war, rather than end the conflict, widen and prolong it? Will we find ourselves sucked into a quagmire, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, one that perhaps will end in humiliating defeat?

If U.S. troops land on one or more of these Iranian islands, how effective will Iran’s anti-ship cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, underwater drones, and mines be in thwarting an assault or an occupation? The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has so far stayed out of range of Iran and operates in the Arabian Sea. Could it move closer to support an amphibious assault? Is an amphibious assault so risky that the only way to take these islands will be from the air?

And, if U.S. forces did occupy one or more of these islands, what kind of damage could Iran’s surface-to-air missiles and air defense drones inflict? How would U.S. forces on these islands obtain logistical support given the difficulty of maneuvering in the narrow strait? Joining me to discuss what may be the next stage of the war on Iran and its potential consequences is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army Colonel and the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

He is a Vietnam War veteran who attended Airborne School, Ranger School, and the Naval War College, and who, as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, logged over 1,000 hours on combat missions. He went on to serve as Deputy Director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico, and was Executive Assistant to Admiral Stuart A. Ring, United States Navy Pacific Command, and Director of the United States Marine Corps War College. He has taught at the College of William and Mary, and George Washington University. He is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military, intelligence, and civilian national security officials who describe themselves as offering alternative analyses untainted by Pentagon or defense industry ties and countering Washington’s establishment narrative on most national security issues of the day.

So, before we begin with some of the specific questions that I raised in the introduction, just give us your view, Larry, of where we are with this war.

Lawrence Wilkerson: That’s difficult to do because the President and the Secretary of War (Defense) have not been very articulate in expressing what their mission is and what their purpose is. But let me back up for a moment and paint a little geostrategic landscape that I think is behind this war and is not talked about by many people, primarily, I think, because they don’t understand it historically or currently. We really are, for some reason, actually trying to stop China from executing its probably, potentially at least, most dangerous base road initiative to our interest. Now that assumes that it is inimical to our interests. I think we have made that assumption. That road would come up through Iran and trace Alexander the Great’s route all the way up through what would be the 1,875 or so miles of shoreline on the Persian Gulf on the eastern side and all the way up to the Caucasus. It would link China’s Pacific ports, just as the other three base road initiative railroads do through Russia and the Caucasus, with Europe in a way that would reduce its shipping time from something like a day and a half to two days, depending on which way you go, to about 16 hours.

Trains have already plied these railroads, including the one going through the southern part of Iran. If that happens, then all maritime nations, leading of which is the United States, of course, ‘the protector of the seas’, will no longer have seas really worth protecting in the sense of commerce, because commerce will be basically land-borne. At least 60 % of it will come out of Asia and go to Europe and elsewhere on the land.

You’ll have to get on some kind of boat to get to South America, I guess. But nonetheless, this is a monumental change, and it’s one we’re fighting tooth and nail. Whether Donald Trump knows any of this or Pete Hegseth knows any of this, I have no idea. But that is, I think, behind a lot of what we’re doing. It’s also behind Ukraine because Ukraine stopped the very central railroad, which was already making 16-hour trips into the heart of Europe going all the way to Bremerhaven and Le Havre and other places like that critical to European trade, if it were not adumbrated, as it were, by the war going on in Ukraine. And, think about that for a moment as to why Joe Biden and others, Blinken and Sullivan, might have had some reason for doing Ukraine, as it were, rather than what they’ve been telling us or what they did tell us. This is all about China, and it’s all about stopping China.

Which is to say, I’m not sure that any of this administration that is functioning in front of us every day knows anything about this other than that their masters have told them to do this. And we can talk about who their masters are back in the shadows, but I think that’s ultimately what we’re looking at. So, it’s much more consequential in this struggle between the rising power and the declining power, and there’s no question about that now, than people think or know.

And so, it has these ramifications that make things that look tactically and even operationally stupid at the moment and yet are tied to this much bigger tapestry of geopolitical and geostrategic reality, declining power, rising power. Where’s Russia going to go in all this? Russia has a choice. She’s both maritime power and land power, principally the latter, as Mackinder made clear. But she does have a formidable maritime capability now growing every moment by her Arctic coastline and the receding ice in the Arctic. So, she’s got a choice to make, and she hadn’t made it yet. It looks like she’s going with China, but there’s this relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which is kind of strange really, if you think about it, unless you understand what Putin wants, which is a better relationship with Washington and maybe even a helping hand, not to Europe, not to NATO, not to the transatlantic link -he’s destroyed those or is destroying them - but to Washington because he sees there’s something left there worth being friendly with. So, we’ve got to work all of that into what we’re talking about right now. And what we’re talking about right now is throwing a sledgehammer into that that is awesome because what Iran is doing is upsetting everybody’s plans to the tune of Mohammed bin Salman being so incredibly insulted by Donald Trump in southern Florida recently, that now he’s thrown his lot in with Zelensky and has changed his routing of his pipelines and other things to avoid Israel and to go through Syria instead. I mean, these are monumental changes that this hugely, hugely wealthy sovereign wealth fund is making almost overnight because of the insults that Trump hurled at MBS.

And then you’ve got Iran. And what Iran can do to this whole business I’ve been talking about in Southwest Asia, which is, if it executes its second tier of targets, the first tier, back up a little bit, the first tier was so devastatingly done and so indicative of fine intelligence that it was unbelievable to many of the regional powers. They hit Bahrain and destroyed the 5th Fleet headquarters and destroyed the largest oil refinery in the Gulf, been there for years, and put the Bahraini royal family and fleet flying away. They hit Erbil, where they had hit a number of times before, in Kurdistan, northern Iraq. They had hit it before with minor missiles just to let the Israelis and the CIA and MI6 know that Iran knew they were there. They hit it this time and just blew it out. They hit our embassy in Baghdad. We’re operating on only emergency personnel there now. And by the way, in Bahrain, we sent 2000 people back with a suitcase, a kit bag, to Norfolk that have now landed in Norfolk. That’s how Marco Rubio did his NEO-business so incompetently. And now the citizens of Norfolk and Chesapeake and other areas, Hampton Roads, are having to support these people who’ve come back with nothing other than the shirt on their back and nothing, just a kit bag. That’s what they were told, and they were gone because Bahrain was struck so fiercely. Well, all to say they have a second tier of targets or maybe a third, but the second tier is much more devastating. The first tier of targets was essentially, as they said, we’re not going to hit you if we don’t have to, Prince Sultan Air Base. We’re not going to hit Saudi Arabia. We’re going to hit the US. Al Udeid, we’re going to hit the US. We’re not going to hit you, Qatar. They had some incidental damage. They even apologized for a lot of it. This time, that’s not a criterion. This time, they’re going to hit it to devastate it, to devastate the region, to devastate Saudi Arabia, to devastate the Emirates, all the other countries. Maybe Oman will be spared. I suspect it will.

This would be a devastating blow to the global economy because we’re talking about places like Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia where it’s 650,000 barrels a day or like Unison in Saudi Arabia where it’s 7 % of the world’s best supply of oil. This is a huge blow, and we’ve already talked about things like urea and helium and other things. Taiwan maybe got about 15 days left and Taiwan is not included in “Yes China, you can go through the strait.” Taiwan cannot go through the strait. So, this could be depression-producing on the globe if they hit these other targets and they shut down and at the same time the Houthis renew their vigorous pursuit of closing the Red Sea to most traffic that is not supportive of taking out the Israelis, if you will.

Then we’ve got two of the most important waterways in the world, Red Sea even, and the Bab al-Mandab, even more important than the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, taken out of commission. We could have a global, not just recession, we’re close to a recession right now, two quarters in a row, we could have a global depression that would impact a lot of the world, even ultimately Russia, which looks like it’s sitting in the catbird seat right now, but might not be if all of a sudden things turn sour for them in this global economy that is not going to be operating anymore.

All to say this is a much, much more serious struggle than anyone in the prima facie team leading this country, America, seems to understand. And that is incredibly worrisome because all Trump seems to know when he hits something like that is doubling down, reinforcing strategic failure and all the faults that one can cite about someone who gets in a mess of his own making that he doesn’t know how to get out of.

Chris Hedges: When you talk about hitting the second tier targets, is this contingent upon the threat to hit oil refineries, oil processing centers in places like Kharg Island? What is it that will trigger that second tier assault?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I don’t know exactly. I’m not sure anyone in the intelligence community knows either. I’m not sure the Iranians have come to a final decision about it. I listened to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s remarks to Al Jazeera English the other day, and he was very definitive about most things. And he usually speaks in English. He’s very competent in English. But he chose to speak in Farsi here and let the Al Jazeera English translator do it. And he seemed a little bit less smooth, perhaps, when he was describing some of the aspects of Iran’s position and what it was in resolution. And they weren’t abandoning that position. And in that, I think I heard that they were going to wait and see what happens with this next iteration of Trump’s war before they actually decide to execute this much more dangerous to the global economy portion of their campaign plan, if you will. And I can understand that. I think Lavrov and Wang Yi in China and now Araghchi are three of the finest diplomats in the world. And I listen to him when he talks and I listen to Wang Yi and I listen to Sergey Lavrov. We have nothing to match them. We have nothing to even come close to them, which is a huge deficit right now.

When he says what he says and he says it with the resolution that he can say it with, I think what he is indicating is we are prepared to go to the wall. And what that means is we are prepared to do everything in our power, not only to, as we have stated as a clear objective, rid Southwest Asia of U.S. military presence, but we’re also prepared to cripple half the fricking region in order to do it. And that’s really disturbing, especially when you know the position that Netanyahu has privately said he’s in now. He’s very, very hard pressed in Lebanon. He’s not winning in Lebanon. He’s hard pressed in the West Bank. He’s winning there because he’s now given very draconian orders to the IDF to join the settlers, Wipe them out, get rid of them, just like he did in Gaza.

So that’s the unknown in this for me, is how attached is Trump to Bibi Netanyahu? And will he go to his destruction and major destruction to the American empire for Bibi? Or will he stop it somewhere? And then if he does stop it, what then will Bibi do?

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s the fear all of us have whether he’ll reach for the nukes. It’s, I think, probably both you and I don’t discount that possibility.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Not at all. And now with Ted Postol having, he called me at William & Mary the other day to make sure I understood what he was talking about. And we talked for some length and I understand what he’s talking about. He believes, and I have every reason to believe him, not just because he’s given me good information in the past about nuclear issues, but because I dealt with the A Q Kahn network in 2002 when we were trying to break it up and I saw what was happening with the North Koreans in particular and the Iranians. And one of the things that I saw was not necessarily related to nuclear technology so much as it was to how to do things underground, which the North Koreans had perfected I mean, absolutely. We, the empire, on the peninsula for how many years, we missed that first nuclear test. We had to get a seismic report from Geneva, look at that seismic report. And then only when we saw that something had occurred that we couldn’t explain, put our assets in the air and on the ground to detect a second test, which we did detect. And we knew they’d do a second one and they did and we detected it.

So, here’s what Ted told me about Iran. Remember what I just told you about North Korea who taught Iran everything they knew. Iran, Ted says, has enough highly-enriched uranium underground, intact, and enough knowledge of warhead technology and matching that warhead to one of their better missiles like the Khorramshahr. And it’s probably going to do that. Underground, it’s going to do that. And I don’t know what it’s going to do from that point on. Is it going to use that missile against Israel or is it just going to hold it in abeyance and use it as a threat, if you will, when the time comes that they are absolutely convinced Bibi’s going to use one or two or more? I think militarily he’s got to use more. One would not do anything to that country. It’s just too big. You’d have to use probably 15 or 20 on strategic targets that he thinks are the underground powerhouses of Iran - ballistic missiles, nuclear program, and so forth.

So we’d be looking at that, and if Iran’s intelligence, which I think has become much better now, and much better even than the Mossad, which I didn’t think I would ever say, but I’m saying it, when their intelligence tells them that Bibi is getting ready to shoot, watch out for Israel because it’s much smaller than Iran and a couple of nuclear weapons would pretty much end Israel.

Chris Hedges: Just as a footnote, the tragedy of course is that the Obama administration had hammered together, I think, a very effective agreement with Iran, had American inspectors. Trump ripped it up. And then by assassinating the Supreme Leader, who had for decades prohibited the production of a nuclear weapon on religious grounds, they essentially have now opened up the real possibility that Iran will use, as you pointed out, and Ted Postel is this MIT expert that people should look up, they’ve really paved the way for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think you’re right, and you’re right too about the Israeli habit of killing people. Go back and look at Nasrallah. Nasrallah was as much a political man as he was a terrorist, if you even call Hezbollah a terrorist. And they got rid of him. And now they’re paying the price for that in many respects because there’s no one there, I don’t think anymore, who’s even interested vaguely in politics. They’re just interested in bringing pain on Israel, and they’re doing it.

I don’t know if you’ve seen these videos, but you see a column of Merkavas and you see the Merkavas moving an administrative road march even into southern Lebanon - Merkava being the Israeli main battle tank - and you see this vaunted Israeli armored corps getting out of their tanks and running because the drones are picking them off one by one.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. Well, they’re also massed together and I have been in enough war to understand that you don’t do that. You space your tanks out. And I don’t understand what they’re doing.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think they just got too full of hubris, the hubris of success. I watched them do the same thing on… the IDF spent too many years on garrison duty, butt-stroking Palestinians when they didn’t want them to come to work that morning.

You can’t put a military like that on garrison duty for 17, 18 years and only intersperse it with things like Operation Cast Lead, where you kill everything in sight, without contaminating your military. So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw some of the things they were doing in Gaza. But now you’ve got Naftali Bennett and others like him, even some members of Netanyahu’s own coalition, who were furious at Netanyahu for not finishing Gaza, for going off and doing Lebanon without finishing Gaza.

They want him to go clean those tunnels out and kill those Hamas fighters. And he hasn’t done it. And they know they’re not going away. So, they’ve got a pincer movement operating on them now to a certain extent, with the only relief on the one end being Trump’s grand city, which Tony Blair, crook of all crooks, is going to run for him. And that’s a pipe dream too. And that the UN associated itself with it by a Security Council resolution just made me ill.

Chris Hedges: It was a very shameful day in the sham peace plan. I want to ask about where we are, as somebody who understands military tactics and strategy, so, you have the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group. That’s hundreds of miles away.

Lawrence Wilkerson: How about 1300?

Chris Hedges: How far? Is it 1300? Okay. Where are they? Down by Diego Garcia? I don’t know where they are.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, it’s a big ocean.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. So, but you do have the movement of, as I mentioned, the Tripoli Amphibious Ready Group. They are moving these troops into the region, talking about bringing in another 10,000 troops. The war is costing us close to a billion dollars a day. There must be a heavy incentive to use these forces, use this equipment. I’m going to ask you because you know far more than I do. I can’t, given the configuration of the Strait, imagine a successful amphibious assault but I’ll let you deal with that. What do you think is coming?

Lawrence Wilkerson: All I can figure, Chris, is that they’re posturing to a certain extent, and they’re only going to use in the actual execution, perhaps on the flanks they might use some of the other forces just for protection, but they’re only going to use a small element, much the way they did in Venezuela, and they’re going to go after something that’s really key, like that uranium that Ted was talking about, and they know, they have intelligence - they’d have to to do this - where it is. And they’re going to go after it and they’re going to try to seal it up and extract it. I think that’s a fancy dream. I don’t see how they’re going to do it, no matter how they marshal their forces. Now on the other side of the coin, not penetrating into Iran in any significant way but still threatening something extraordinarily valuable to Iran, Kharg Island, might be doable in the sense that your Ospreys might have the legs, they might have the range, they might not have clutch failure over the target and kill the Marines just because they’re in an Osprey.

Chris Hedges: We should say, having spent time with the Marines, that was a most dreaded aspect of being a Marine was getting in an osprey, but you can explain.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I had a Marine general actually say to me, you know, I’m not sure what I’d do to a Marine who walked up to the door in a training mission or a combat mission even, and said to me, “I’m not sure I want to get on that bird” because he would have reason to do so. But anyway, they only have about a 350, maybe maximum 400 mile range, and they probably are going to have to loiter in order to get anything off of them and onto Kharg Island. Then they’ve got to come back and do whatever extraction they’re going to do. If they’re going to do it that way, maybe they might bring the boat up or Tripoli or something like that and do it with that. But all of that is so fraught with if Iran really does have the drones that we think they have and does have even more sophisticated missiles along that Persian Gulf, 1,875 miles of terrain that it is, then that’s fraught with problems. I mean, you’re going to get the Osprey shot down. You’re going to get the Marines killed en route. You’re going to get them killed while they’re landing. And you’re going to have a hard time establishing a beachhead, so to speak. I just don’t know how they’re going to do it.

I could see it being done if everything went perfectly and there wasn’t as much of an opposition as I’m imagining there is. And if you had some way of suppressing that opposition as you were going in, but I don’t see the wherewithal to do that in the way that it would have to be done, and I don’t see the timing and the geography contributing to it being done, because it’s so difficult. I mean, just take a look at how we got into Iraq for two wars. We used probably the world’s greatest armored movement facility, certainly in Southwest Asia, that was in Kuwait.

And we did two wars that way. We flowed the troops in and they flowed into Iraq and they did their business in Iraq. They had time and space to get ready to do what they were going to do in Kuwait. Well, Iran hit that. They hit that facility. And last time I saw it, it was burning. So, I don’t know that they can use that facility. Now they might could use Kuwait, but then look at the map. Look at where they have to go from Kuwait to get where they got to go. They either go through Basra, that area of Iraq, or they go straight from Kuwait to Kharg, or they come in by some other circuitous way, up the Gulf maybe, and they’re vulnerable that whole way if what I’m being told about Iran’s capacity to defend that terrain is what it is.

Chris Hedges: Would they, Larry, be coming in on helicopters? Would they be flying out of Kuwait on helicopters?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, no, they’d be the Ospreys. The tilt rotor. It’s a helicopter. And I could see it happening if everything were exquisitely done and the Iranians were suppressed or don’t have the capacity that I’m told they do have. But I can’t see it done in the face of that capacity and the difficulty of the mission.

I see a lot of deaths. I see a lot of problems. I don’t see a Venezuela at all.

Chris Hedges: Well, the Iranians have batteries all along the coastline, right?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I met with President Ahmadinejad along with Frank Wisner, a couple of others, a couple of Madeleine Albright’s people too, in New York when he was there for the UN General Assembly. And my mission with Ahmadinejad was to convince him, each of us, Tom Pickering, Frank Wisner, me, a couple of others, had a five-minute spiel for President Ahmadinejad. Mine was to create an Inc-Sea Agreement, Incidents at Sea Agreement, like we have with the Soviets, but with the Iranians. So that if we had an incident in the Gulf or in the Strait or in the Northern Arabian Sea or Sea of Oman, we would go immediately to the protocols and not start a war.

And one of the things he did when I finished my speech was he looked at me and he said, “Now, let me ask you a question, Colonel. Iran has 1,875 roughly nautical miles shoreline on the Persian Gulf. The United States has none. What’s the problem?” And then a big smile, “Why are you there?” And, you know, there’s no comeback for that. He’s right. It’s his sea. It’s his territory of water. And why do you need an Inc-Sea Agreement? You need it because of the United States, not because of Iran.

But I relate that because he convinced me, as did his advisors with him when I spoke afterwards. He was mostly in Farsi. They were pretty good in English, and his foreign minister was very good in English. They convinced me that that shoreline is armed to the teeth. So, if that’s the case, and wouldn’t it be very armed to the teeth around Kharg? I mean, that’s the forbidden Island. That’s where 10 supertankers can load simultaneously. So I’d be protecting…

Chris Hedges: That’s 90 % I think of their oil exports out of Kharg. But all of these islands are small. So, once you occupy them, you can just rain ordinance upon, you’re just exposed occupied forces.

Lawrence Wilkerson: You’d be raining ordinance on Kharg, on your own facilities, but who’s to say they wouldn’t do that? You can always build them back.

Chris Hedges: Well, the Israelis did that on October 7th. They killed a lot of their own soldiers.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yeah. There are pros and cons there. I was talking to an oil man, Gary Vogler, who was our oil man in Iraq for 78 months, worked out of the Iraqi oil ministry. And he told me that the destruction in Bahrain would be extremely complicated if you tried to rebuild that refinery. So, we’re talking about roughly the same kind of facilities in terms of difficulty. It’d be hard to rebuild it if it were completely destroyed. So, they wouldn’t want to do that, I don’t think. But would they do it in order to kick an aggressor off? Probably.

Chris Hedges: One of things that’s, you know, I have been involved in the Middle East, spent seven years there, of course, but going back decades, I mean, Bibi’s been pushing this war with Iran for four decades, but there has been such resistance within the Pentagon. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Republican administration, a Democratic administration, the Pentagon has just adamantly put up roadblocks to this. Trump, of course, took the bait. But explain why there was such resistance.

Lawrence Wilkerson: One reason is my old boss at the Marine Corps Combat Educational Development Command at Quantico, Virginia, Lieutenant General Van Riper, whom I met in Williamsburg recently and, at 88 years old, had an opportunity to review our vetting, if you will. He did a war game in 2002, I think at the request of the Pentagon. A very, very capable man at simulating wargaming and so forth. And it was called Millennium Challenge 02. And we got our ass handed to us. It was Iran. We staged it in the Gulf, and Iran handed us our rear end. It was so bad that they even ordered him to redo the game.

And he did, and it’s the same results, essentially. And then he went away. That’s part of the reason, because people have memories in the Pentagon, and they know how difficult that war was and would be. And they also know that in the intervening two-plus decades, Iran has gotten much, much better.

For example, when we were doing Operation Ernest Will, reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and escorting them through the Strait, essentially the same scenario as right now, we lost Bridgerton, not sunk, but a big, big ship was hit. Captain was furious with us. Then we almost lost a DD, a destroyer. Saddam Hussein shot another ship with two Exocet missiles, and then we shot down an Iranian airbus by accident from an Aegis cruiser, Vincennes, and killed 290 innocent civilians. And then Khomeini threw in the towel saying he could not possibly fight both Iraq and the United States. But I say that because that was then, and we had grievous difficulty in doing what we had to do.

Then was then. Now they have learned. They have learned multitudes of lessons. They have built all manner of defenses. They have consulted with people like the Russians and the Chinese. They are getting help right now from both of those countries.

Chris Hedges: Well, intelligence they have, that’s I think one of reasons they’ve had such precision strikes, is they have both Iranian and Chinese satellites working on their behalf.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think you’re right. And we’ve made some demarches to Moscow over that, but I don’t think Moscow gives a hang. As long as Zelensky’s shooting Putin’s oil facilities with his weaponry, they’re not going to give a hang. All to say Iran’s a lot better, a lot smarter and resolute. And when you listen to Araghchi, you get the resolution in spades. We are not going away. We are in your face. We don’t trust you. You were duplicitous. You torpedoed - his word in English. - you torpedoed negotiations not once, but twice with military action in the middle of them. Why would we listen to you now?

Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about General Caine. He’s an Air Force officer and as you well know, once wrote a book, and John McCain and I wrote the introduction to the book, and could not be radically different. It was a book on war. And I said, that’s because he was 10,000 feet up in the air. He doesn’t have any idea what was happening on the ground. And Kane comes out of the Air Force. Yet this potentially could become a ground operation.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, you made your point with the fact it’s an air operation. What was it, JF? No.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, they’re trying to break the regime with an air operation, but it has not worked. So now they’re contemplating a ground operation.

Lawrence Wilkerson: LBJ once said to, I think, George Ball convinced LBJ that we weren’t going to win in Vietnam. That’s my belief. I’m standing by it. I got the primary documents to prove it. And when LBJ was told about Rolling Thunder, I guess it was, more bombs on North Vietnam than we dropped on Germany, he said, “Old Ho, ain’t going to be moved by no bombs.” He was right. And no country is going to be, they’re just going to be made more resolute.

I walked into Powell’s office one day in a miff, and I closed the door and I said, “General, we don’t ever want to make an Air Force officer chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff again.” He looked at me and he said, “Why do you say that?” I said, “Because they don’t understand ground warfare.” He said, “You’re right. We’ll work hard on it.” Facetious, but it’s true. Kane does not understand ground warfare. And the people who do understand ground warfare underneath him and around him are, I think, being either removed by Hegseth in the past six months or so, or are too timid to speak up to Kane in a way that would be decisive or convincing or get them fired, probably the latter. The one or two that have, the Navy three star, for example, oddly enough, Navy, who was director of the Joint Staff. I think that’s the reason they sent him back to the fleet is what Hegseth said, and maybe one or two other people. And I thought surely that this recent brouhaha with Hegseth, with Randy George, the chief staff of the Army, I thought that and the chief of chaplains, I figured that was Hegseth’s religiosity, but I figured George was leaving because of this war or had been fired because of his objections thereto. But what I’m hearing is it’s all about, and this makes sense, but not nearly as much as the war would, it’s all about the Brigadier General Promotion Board that Hegseth interfered with, unprecedentedly interfered with and kicked the two black officers and the two women off the promotion list. And that got George’s goat.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. He’s the chief of staff, right?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Of the army, yeah.

And then the chaplain was because Hegseth has demoralized the chaplain corps. He’s eliminated a whole bunch of the diversity in the chaplain corps. We’re down to Christians and Jews now, if you will. And taken their rank away and really demoralized the chaplain corps. And they don’t like these prayer meetings he’s having every week in the Pentagon. So, it wasn’t so much over the war, but I got to believe that some of that was gestating in their guts that they don’t like this, especially the ground pounders, the soldiers.

Chris Hedges: Yeah, that rhetoric by Hegseth as someone who spent many years in the Middle East is just not playing well in the Muslim world, I can assure you.

Lawrence Wilkerson: It’s insanity. And the tattoos are insanity too. Pound them back? Araghchi had a wonderful comment, “Pound us back to the Stone Age. Does he know what we were in the Stone Age?” Then he shows a map of the Persian empire. “Pound us back there.”

Chris Hedges: Yeah, right. Where do you think we’re headed? I mean, clearly the Iranians will determine when this ends. They show very little sign of wanting a ceasefire or an agreement. I don’t know why they would trust the Trump administration because Trump attacks, both in June and now, when they are negotiating and then will kill negotiating teams as he did with Hamas and so and they can inflict a lot of pain. I found Trump’s speech kind of fascinating in that it just didn’t make any sense. It was all over the place. Where do you think we’re going? What’s next? I know it’s hard to predict.

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think Haaretz had it right in a headline about a week and a half ago or so when it said, “All Iran has to do to win is not lose.” The United States to win has to have a spectacular victory, and so does Bibi. So that’s not going to occur. Iran is not going to lose. I think they’ll fight until the last person standing.

Chris Hedges: Right.

Lawrence Wilkerson: So, it’s disaster. I don’t see any way we extract ourselves from this other than, as I said, having the wisdom to say something like, well, we won, we’re out of here. But I don’t see how we do that, especially this man, Trump. I don’t see how he does it.

Chris Hedges: Do you think they’ll deploy ground troops?

Lawrence Wilkerson: They may try something small. They may because, as I said, we simply don’t have the forces to try anything large, and certainly nothing large enough. It would take somewhere between, and this goes back to my war game experience with Iran in some cases, we used to have responsibility for the Persian Gulf in that area at Pacific Command when I was there. There wasn’t any Central Command except a little tiny colonel in Florida. We were the force provider for them. We were the planner for them. And when we were doing this, we estimated that, let me give you an example of a specific plan we were working on. You remember when the Russians invaded Afghanistan? And we, military people, we thought, this can’t be about Afghanistan. It’s gotta be those warm water ports they want. So, they’re gonna pour through Iran down to Bandar Abbas in Chabahar and get their warm water ports. This is an age-old great game objective.

Chris Hedges: I just want to interject my father was an intelligence officer in Iran during World War II and they were doing precisely that, stopping the Russians.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Well, we started planning in the Zagros Mountains and elsewhere, and we concluded we don’t want to fight there. But we did come up with a plan, and it was two million men. And it was probably five years. And investing Iraq was not part of it. That is to say we weren’t planning on occupying the country, but we were planning on keeping enough forces there to have the country meet our interest, if you will. And that costs a lot of money. Probably fast forward to today, it would be somewhere around five, six trillion dollars. And we don’t have those men. And if we had a draft, half our 18-to-24-year-old cohort would go to Mexico or Canada overnight. I don’t think we could have a draft.

Chris Hedges: Well, not to mention the fact that it would be a very costly conflict.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes, very, very, in blood and treasure. And they’re proving it.

Chris Hedges: So, is your best guess for, if we do see something on the ground, it would first be an attempt by special forces to hit suspected uranium sites? Or do you think that they will try and take some of these islands? Or maybe you think they don’t know. I don’t know. What is your feeling?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think it’ll be small and I think it’ll be aimed at a precise target or target set. It might be the uranium, it might be Kharg Island, it might be somewhere else we’re not even thinking about right now. First of all, I don’t think it’ll be very successful in the scheme of things. And second, I think it’s gonna get some Americans killed. And we already have more deaths than you know about.

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s the other thing I wanted to ask you. It’s oftentimes in war that casualty figures are not released in real time.

Lawrence Wilkerson: They are never released in real time, really. Look at the Battle of the Bulge, the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes in 44, 45, 78,000 plus casualties. And the New York Times, New York papers, Washington, what’d they call the other Washington paper at that time? The Star, and they had a morning and an afternoon edition. They didn’t carry those casualties. Eisenhower wouldn’t allow it.

You can’t shock the American people that way. These aren’t those number of casualties, but today the American people aren’t ready for many casualties at all. So, you have to be very careful. You remember Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was really uneasy about letting Dover out of the bag as it were when the insurgency started. And “No, anybody around here say insurgency, I’ll fire them. There’s no insurgency.”

Chris Hedges: Well, and the other thing was they put a ban on when the remains were returned to Dover, they couldn’t be covered. Do you have any sense of where we are in terms of casualties, any guess?

Lawrence Wilkerson: I think we’re well over 100, and it includes some civilians that got injured in the fracas in Qatar, Prince Sultan. I don’t know how many casualties are Saudi or Bahraini or whatever, probably quite a few.

And this business of sending these people back to Norfolk with nothing but a kit bag, it’s typical Navy, but the Navy really isn’t to blame in the sense that nobody gave them any NEO, non-combatant evacuation operation, instructions. And I’m sure that they didn’t do that if they even thought about it. It might be that they’re just totally incompetent, but if they didn’t think about it at all, it probably was because we have not filled about 30 % of the embassy staffs in that region with Donald Trump. We don’t have ambassadors in those countries. And secondly, they didn’t want to give warning. If you do a NEO, you’re giving your enemy warning.

Chris Hedges: Yeah. Great. Thank you, Larry. And I want to thank Max, Sophia, and Thomas who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

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