President Trump keeps signaling that the Iran war he started with Israel is nowhere close to completion, despite his repeated assurances otherwise — and despite the war’s mounting economic costs, largely stemming from the Strait of Hormuz’s near-closure. More U.S. troops keep arriving in the Middle East as Trump weighs various options for a ground offensive to accomplish his objective of…well, that seems to change by the day. Trump has struggled to even articulate the goals of the war, which have pinballed from regime change to destroying Iran’s missile capability to forestalling the country from producing a nuclear weapon — which makes settling on a plan somewhat more difficult. Still, that if Trump does choose to escalate, he will likely he choose from a suite of options that would accomplish specific military goals, like extracting Iran’s uranium — a highly risky operation that Trump is open to, per a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday night.

As Rosemary Kelanic sees it, that would the worst of the likely options Trump is being presented with. Kelanic is director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities, and previously taught at Notre Dame and Williams College. She is also the author of the book Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics and a frequent contributor to media outlets on energy policy and U.S. strategy in the Middle East. I spoke with her about various scenarios for U.S. ground troops in Iran, from the merely dangerous to the “nonsensical.”

The Pentagon is reportedly considering sending another 10,000 ground troops to the Middle East, on top of the 50,000 already there. Do you have any sense of whether this is more of a faint than a prelude to a new military operation? Is there any way of telling the difference between those two?There’s no real way of telling the difference between those two, which is what makes it so effective as a potential bargaining tactic but also as potential preparations for war. You can move forces into the theater and the adversary doesn’t really know what you’re going to use them for. But just based on what we’ve seen Trump do over the past year of his presidency, I doubt very much this is a bargaining tactic. It seems likely to me that this is a genuine escalation, or at least that he’s seriously considering escalating if those 10,000 troops materialize. That number is not enough to invade large areas of Iran, but it’s enough to get into some serious trouble. And it just shows this dynamic of how missions tend to expand beyond what you think they’re going to be when you start a war.

Mission creep.Absolutely. Mission creep, occupation creep — it’s pretty textbook in this case. So whatever the objective of this force is, and we’ve heard about at least three potential objectives — seizing nuclear material, taking Kharg Island, securing islands in the Strait of Hormuz — it’s not clear if they’re adequate for any of those things. Or maybe they are, but........

© Daily Intelligencer