First Draft: 🇮🇷 The Kharg Island Bloodbath?
If Trump carries out his decades-long violent fantasy, his team expects ‘considerable’ US casualties. Plus, the clock is ticking on the US president's threat to commit war crimes in Iran.
On this day in 2022, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally declared that members of Russia’s armed forces had committed war crimes in Ukraine. Four years on, Donald Trump initially said Iran had until Monday evening to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or he would “obliterate” power plants – an act generally considered a war crime itself. He said this morning he was postponing any strikes on Iran’s power plants for five days.
Good morning! Swin and Andrew here, with an update on Donald Trump’s illegal, pointless, disastrous, and expanding war in Iran. Our idiot president has, for decades, wanted to “go in and take” Kharg Island and seize Iran’s oil infrastructure – and because he’s surrounded himself with cultists and sycophants in his second term, he’ll get to carry out his fantasy, if that’s what he chooses.
The only problem? Well, many Americans would likely die pointlessly.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the Trump administration knows many Americans will die if he invades Kharg Island, Trump and Iran exchange dire threats to life-sustaining infrastructure, and ICE is heading to America’s airports.
A ‘Considerable’ Body Count
Senior Trump administration officials have been briefed on US casualty estimates – prepared by military and intelligence personnel – for a variety of possible ground invasion scenarios in their illegal Iran war, two sources familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it tell us.
In multiple scenarios, if Donald Trump were to invade and try to occupy Kharg Island for an extended period of time, American casualties would very likely be “considerable,” one of the people familiar with the matter says. Some estimates, the first two sources tell us, are easily in the dozens for an initial phase of occupation, with numbers likely to rise sharply if President Trump wished to hold the island for an extended duration.
Some of the internal Kharg analysis has been shared directly with Trump in recent weeks, sources stress.
Trump has long been fascinated with Kharg Island, which holds the bulk of Iran’s oil exports. During his Art of the Deal book tour in 1988, Trump said he would “go in and take it.”
Harrison Mann, a former US intelligence analyst, has written for Zeteo about why a Kharg Island invasion is a bad idea. He writes further for the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog: “For the troops unlucky enough to receive orders to take Kharg, the operation would land somewhere between a suicide mission and a self-imposed hostage crisis.”
As he explains, it’s not clear what the point of the Kharg mission would be, because securing Iran’s oil infrastructure might not necessarily create much leverage for Trump. “The opportunity to inflict a mass casualty event that could sap limited US public support for the war, or to hold entire battalions as de facto hostages, may well appear more valuable to Tehran than oil revenue,” Mann adds.
Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of counterterrorism, who just resigned over Trump’s Iran war, told the Washington Post that a Kharg invasion “would be a disaster.”
“It would essentially be giving Iran a bunch of hostages on an island that they could barrage with drones and missiles,” he said.
One thing was obvious to us lately: A good number of Zeteo’s well-placed sources, in and close to the US government, are leaking things like this to us (and, we’re sure, others in the media and elsewhere) because they do not want the president to pull the trigger on this. They say they think a ground invasion, whether protracted or not, would be an inevitable bloodbath and political disaster for the American side.
We will be straight with you: We do not think their efforts to spook President Trump out of this are going to work. We really hope we are wrong.