GOP braces for Trump to possibly deploy troops inside Iran

Republicans are bracing for President Trump to deploy U.S. troops on the ground in Iran as the conflict in the Middle East crosses into its third week with no signs of slowing down. 

The administration is reportedly weighing missions to secure a safe passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and overtake Iran’s Kharg Island, an industrial hub in the Persian Gulf that handles 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

Fears that Trump will decide to send troops into Iran have been fueled by news that the Pentagon is speeding up the deployment of thousands of additional Marines and sailors to the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) area, even as the president denied that he will be sending additional manpower. 

“No, I’m not putting troops anywhere,” Trump said at the White House on Thursday. 

“If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” the president told reporters.

The U.S. military buildup has continued to swell as the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which consisted of at least 2,200 Marines, departed from San Diego on amphibious assault ship USS Boxer and will head to the Middle East, days after another unit of Marines and sailors was ordered to join from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. 

The potential for boots on the ground puts Republicans in a delicate spot, balancing support for Trump’s military objectives in Iran and worries of the conflict growing more unpopular with the public as it rages on. 

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who sits in the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Friday morning the thousands of Marines ordered to Centcom provide “a lot of leverage” for the administration and emphasized that Trump loves to keep reporters “on their toes.” 

“We shouldn’t be telling people what we are going to do and when we are going to do it. But believe me, President Donald J Trump has the best interests of the United States at heart, but he also loves our men and women in uniform. He will not engage them unnecessarily,” Ernst said during an interview on Fox Business. 

Other GOP lawmakers are seeking to redefine “boots on the ground” to exclude the missions being considered by Trump.

Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla), when asked if sending troops to Kharg Island was placing boots on the ground, said that people would see it as an “occupation of a vital economic interest.”

“I’ve always considered boots on the ground, as a history teacher, is literally where we would occupy an entire country…like we did after World War 2 in Japan, right,” Haridopolos, whose son is in the military, said on Friday during an appearance on C-SPAN. 

“We all have a horrible taste in our mouth from happen in Iraq and I’m sure our current leadership has learned a lot of lessons from that,” he said. 

Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, said the Pentagon dispatching the Marines to Centcom and Trump discussing the possibility of the U.S. taking Kharg Island is a way to keep Iran’s regime guessing. 

“The target of those statements are the mullahs in Tehran. Now they’re like, Oh, wow, is he going to do this? What are we doing? So they start worrying about repelling an invasion, and he does something completely different, and catches him off by surprise,” Sadler, who spent over two decades in the Navy with numerous operational tours on nuclear-powered submarines, said in an interview with The Hill on Friday. 

“The simple way to answer is, like the Marines are really in all these conversations about making the Iranians have to worry about more possible options, not less,” he said. 

So far, 232 U.S. service members have been wounded in the war, with the “vast majority” of them sustaining minor injuries, a defense official told The Hill on Friday, and over 200 of them have returned to duty. The Pentagon has previously said that 13 U.S. service members have been killed in the conflict. 

The Pentagon is sending three warships to the Middle East and has reportedly ordered the 31st 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, aboard the Japan-based USS Tripoli, to Centcom. 

Mike Jernigan, a former Marine and Iraq combat veteran, said the MEUs, which have F-35 fighter jets and Cobra attack helicopters, offer “tremendous flexibility” to the combatant commander as they can perform a variety of missions, including evacuating embassies. 

“But they also have several other missions that’ll probably be pertinent in the coming weeks. Those include taking over oil refineries,” Jernigan, a visiting fellow in the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation, said in an interview with The Hill.

“Those can include launching amphibious raids against coastal rocket batteries, but I also see them using probably going after the boathouses where the Iranians have their autonomous vehicle fleets in the Straits of Hormuz.” 

Earlier this week, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) argued that U.S. forces being sent to Kharg Island would not count as “boots on the ground” in the country. 

“These 2,500 Marines, the Marine Expeditionary Force, would be to probably secure the island,” Sessions said Tuesday on CNN. “The island is not, in my opinion, boots on the ground in combat circumstances, it would be to secure the facility.”

The American public is convinced that Trump will order troops into Iran, with 65 percent of them saying the president will “order troops into a large-scale ground war” in Iran, according to a Thursday Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 7 percent said they would support the effort. 

More than half of respondents, 55 percent, were against deploying any ground troops into the Islamic Republic, while 34 percent said they would back dispatching a small number of special forces troops into the nation, the survey found. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that regime change in Iran would require a “ground component” along with a revolution. 

“It is often said that you can’t win –– you can’t do revolutions from the air, that is true,” Netanyahu said in a press conference. “You can’t do it only from there, you can do a lot of things from the air and we’re doing –– but there has to be a ground component, as well.

Trump ruled out the prospect of a ceasefire with Iran for now, saying “we’re not looking to do that.”

“You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re obliterating the other side. They don’t have a navy. They don’t have an Air Force,” the president told reporters. 

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