A Watery Market-Garden?

In World War II, the Western allies one attempt to employ operational art was a failure. Operation Market-Garden dropped British paratroopers on a key bridge in the Netherlands, which they were to hold only briefly until an American armored force coming from the south arrived to take over. But the armor attack was unsuccessful, leaving the Brits hanging out to dry.

We now have roughly a brigade of Marines on amphibious assault ships heading for the Persian Gulf. What are they to do when they get there? Most probably they will seize some small Iranian islands at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. This should be a fairly easy operation, but like most low-risk actions, it would also be low payoff. It would not reopen the Persian Gulf to commercial shipping.

Part of the problem here is that we seem to think that if we can control the Strait of Hormuz, commercial ships will immediately start shipping out Gulf oil. They will not. Why? Because even if Hormuz is open, the rest of the Persian Gulf remains an Iranian shooting gallery. No major shipping company is going to risk its tankers there. President Trump’s offer to insure those ships only shows his complete lack of grasp of the complex business of marine insurance. The Houthis have stopped shooting at commercial shipping at the mouth of the Red Sea for months, and shippers were only beginning to consider sending ships on that route again. With Mr. Trump’s war of choice on Iran, they have again dropped that option.

But there is another possibility for employing those Marines: an attack on Kharg Island. Kharg Island is Iran’s main oil export facility. It makes little strategic sense to take or destroy it, because doing so would only remove more oil from the world market (Iran is still shipping oil to China). But the rumor mill says we intend to take Kharg with an airborne assault, then reinforce the paratroopers with a Marine amphibious force coming from the south—in the process running that Iranian shooting gallery for about 300 miles. Welcome to my parlor, says the spider to the fly.

Again, we appear to have reduced the Persian Gulf problem merely to opening the Strait of Hormuz. That is itself no easy task, but unless the whole of the Gulf is secured against missiles, mines, suicide boats, etc., commercial shipping will not return. Hormuz is comparatively the easy part, and holding Kharg Island would not change the fact that Iran can attack ships from anywhere on their side of the Gulf.

The sequence is easy to imagine: Marines take the islands at the Strait’s mouth, which accomplishes nothing toward bringing back commercial shipping. We take Kharg, which again moves us no closer to our goal of bringing the tankers back to Gulf ports. At that point, Mr. Trump realizes he is losing the war to Iran and he orders a full-scale invasion of the Iranian mainland to seize the entire Iranian coastline. That isolates Mr. Trump politically to the point where Congress, his base and the senior military leadership say, “You’re done,” and he leaves office, either by resignation or by Republicans joining with Democrats to impeach and convict.

By doing what he promised Americans he would not do, starting a new war of choice (and for another country’s interests, not our own), Mr. Trump has destroyed his Presidency. And the U.S. will have lost yet another war it never needed to fight.