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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
As we continue our look at the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, numerous nations have rejected a request from President Trump to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has largely shut down the critical waterway. About 20% of the world’s oil exports flows through the strait. On Monday, Germany’s defense minister said, “This is not our war.” President Trump criticized allies who are refusing to help.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t do a hard sell on them, because my attitude is we don’t need anybody. We’re the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don’t need them. But it’s interesting. I’m almost doing it, in some cases, not because we need them, but because I want to find out how they react.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Trump continues to give mixed messages on his war plans. On Friday, he was interviewed by Brian Kilmeade on Fox News.
BRIAN KILMEADE: When are you going to know when it’s over?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: When I feel it.
BRIAN KILMEADE: OK.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I feel it in my bones.
AMY GOODMAN: “When I feel it in my bones.” This all comes as the U.S. is sending 2,500 Marines and an amphibious assault ship to the Middle East.
We go now to Harrison Mann, former U.S. Army major who resigned in 2024 from the DIA — that’s the Defense Intelligence Agency — over the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza. He’s now a senior fellow at Win Without War, a network of activists and groups working for a more peaceful, progressive U.S. foreign policy. His most recent piece for Zeteo is headlined “I Was a US Intelligence Analyst. Here’s What a Ground Invasion of Iran Could Look Like.”
Harrison Mann, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us what that ground invasion can look like, as the U.S. is bringing thousands more U.S. troops to the Gulf region.
HARRISON MANN: Thank you.
So, for context here, I think, really, from day two of this war, the Trump administration has not known what to do and how to get out of this, so there’s really little left to try other than a ground invasion. The other context I want to add is that from the Israeli side, as your last guest, Trita, mentioned, a long war that aims to collapse the Iranian state is good for them.
So, with that in mind, there’s a couple options that Trump administration officials themselves have floated in the press. One is doing a landing on something called Kharg Island, which handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports and is located deep in the Persian Gulf, past the Strait of Hormuz. Another option, also floated by Trump officials themselves, is some kind of raid on Iranian nuclear sites to try and secure or sabotage Iran’s highly enriched uranium.
To talk about the Marines you mentioned, I think it’s really important to note, you know, we’ve seen this Marine expeditionary unit described as 5,000 troops, or you said 2,500 Marines. There’s 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard these ships altogether. There’s only about 1,200 actual ground troops, which is a relatively small number if you’re talking about invading a country, even if it’s just seizing a small island. So I want us to keep that in mind.
I think the target that seems to have risen to the top of Trump’s list — we saw him and Lindsey Graham tweeting about it over the weekend — is Kharg Island. Again, it’s a piece of critical oil infrastructure. The idea is that if you can capture it, you will basically get to hold 90% of Iran’s oil exports hostage. The issue with this is that you have to sail — if you’re going by ship, you have to make it through the Strait of Hormuz, which the U.S. Navy currently determines is too dangerous for it to go through, or if you fly in, you’re still landing on an island that’s just about 15 miles off the coast of Iran. So, frankly, I think any attempt to seize this island would be close to a suicide mission — I hate to say it — with U.S. troops within range not just of the drones and missiles that Iran has targeted the whole Gulf and Israel with, but also shorter-range weapons that they haven’t had the opportunity to use yet — artillery rockets, short-range drones. And it’s really easy to imagine how, if you drop troops on that island, they could really end up being trapped there, which would really play into the hands of the Iranian government. And I think a U.S. mass casualty event or even a de facto hostage situation would be much more valuable to Iran’s surviving leaders than the oil terminal that the operation would purportedly capture.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Harrison Mann, what about the logistics nightmare, even if they were able to land troops, which I’m sure they would be able to, the logistics nightmare of protecting and supplying any force like that so deep into the Persian Gulf and so close to Iran?
HARRISON MANN: Yeah, again, I think resupply or even insertion or evacuation by sea is extremely dangerous, for all the weapons I mentioned, plus Iran, as has been discussed in the news, can mine these waters, both around the island and in the Strait of Hormuz. They have drone boats in addition to aerial drones. If you want to try and do resupply or reinforcement by air, that might be possible, but it’s possible to ambush aircraft, as well. We saw the Houthis do it in the campaigns in the Red Sea over the past two years. So even aerial resupply or insertion would be quite fraught.
And it’s a real risk that you have U.S. troops trapped under fire and running out of supplies on this island. And I want to mention, this really applies to anywhere that you put U.S. troops on Iranian soil. Some figures on Fox News have also discussed trying to land troops near the Strait of Hormuz to clear out anti-ship missiles there to make it safe for oil tankers and shipping to go through. I mean, that really gives you the exact same risk of troops trapped in Iran, where it’s extremely difficult to resupply or just get them out of there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you also about Israel. Israel is involved now in a multifront war here, not only with Iran and defending against missiles coming, retaliatory strikes from Iran, but in Lebanon, as well. There are still Israeli troops in Syria. And they’re fighting two domestic fronts in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank also and in Gaza. How long can Israel, in your sense, keep up this kind of multifront war?
HARRISON MANN: I think Israel can, honestly, keep it up as long as the U.S. continues to supply it with munitions and an incredible amount of air defense and air protection, right? There’s nothing really keeping the Israeli military from pulling out of Iran and focusing entirely on Lebanon. The U.S. is already fighting the war Netanyahu wanted for him, right? Israeli air power is not adding a whole lot to that. So we could see that happen. They could keep going in Lebanon for a while, if they continue to enjoy U.S. air defenses, resupply of interceptors and now the ground munitions, tank and artillery shells, that they need to fight in Lebanon.
The political side of that, I’m less sure of. I think we’re heading towards a nearly unprecedented level of rockets and drones and missiles actually hitting things inside Israel, not being intercepted. So I don’t know how long Israeli people will put up with that before demanding political change. But so far, Netanyahu has been pretty successful at keeping public support, or at least preventing substantive opposition to starting new wars, especially over the past two years.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about, Harrison Mann — and if you can just say what the DIA does, what you resigned from —
HARRISON MANN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — the Defense Intelligence Agency?
HARRISON MANN: Yeah, so, it’s sort of like a miniature CIA, and it performs a lot of the same analytic functions. So, my office was responsible for assessing strategic intentions and military capabilities of all of the countries in the Middle East, figuring out what they were going to do and what the status of their armed forces were. So, right now they’re probably looking very closely at how many Iranian missiles and Navy assets and other strategic assets are left.
AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about — during the U.S. war on Iraq, when the U.S. invaded, Bush would always talk, President George W. Bush, about the “coalition of the willing.”
HARRISON MANN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, we’re talking about, at this moment, doesn’t look like there’s any coalition. You have Italy saying — and this is a right leader of Italy — right? — Giorgia Meloni, “Diplomacy needs to prevail.” Estonia, when talking about this coalition: “It’s a bit rich.” Spain: “The objective must be for the war to end.” Australia: “We won’t be sending a ship to the Strait of Hormuz.” Germany: “It’s not NATO’s war.” The significance of Trump first castigating all these allies, and then saying they have to do something here? And they’re saying they won’t.
HARRISON MANN: Yeah, I mean, and just historically, it takes a lot for European leaders not to follow the U.S. into a Middle East intervention, if you look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and the general complacency there. So, I think this is the latest fissure Trump is creating in the NATO alliance and the U.S.-Europe relationship, where he’s transgressed so much that Europeans are not willing to assist.
But I do want to note that, you know, the U.S. Navy — U.S. has more aircraft carriers than all these countries combined. The help from European countries, I think, would be much more symbolic than actually materially necessary to change the course of this war.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in your former agency, the DIA, you were tasked with understanding and developing military strategy. What level of a strategic blunder do you consider what has happened here with this war in Iran, historically speaking, in terms of the U.S. and its military?
HARRISON MANN: Yeah, I think, on the American side, it’s just totally strategically bankrupt. Again, no plan after the first 24 hours, when it didn’t immediately turn into Venezuela with a seemingly successful regime replacement operation. And we’ve seen them really just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? It was less than two weeks ago that Trump policy was try to foment a Kurdish uprising and fracture Iran, right? They abandoned that in like 48 hours. Now we’re seeing him basically try and do policy by tweet and seeing if Europeans are willing to bail him out. Amy, as you mentioned, they’re absolutely not.
And I think it’s important to note that it’s — Donald Trump was probably surprised by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, by the attacks on all the Gulf states, by the skyrocketing oil prices. And we’re also going to see foodstuffs go up, because 30% of the world’s fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz, as well. But the people who drove him into this war are not dumb and very much expected this. I don’t think this is a surprise to Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio or Benjamin Netanyahu — who is very much getting what he wanted, which is dragging the U.S. into what he hopes will be a decisive war of annihilation against Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, this is an election year, and the concern about the level of danger the U.S. troops face, not to mention others, but, I mean, 200 troops injured, 13 dead. Over the weekend, the Pentagon named six U.S. service members who were killed when their military refueling plane crashed in Iraq last week. The family of Technical Sergeant Tyler Simmons, including his grandma, spoke to NBC in Columbus, Ohio. They criticized the war on Iran.
STEPHAN DOUGLAS: This could have been prevented. We didn’t need to be in this war. You know, this is — this is uncalled for. And this is what we get.
BERNICE SMITH: Families are suffering right now. Not only our family, but there are other families that’s lost loved ones. … Just to create a war because you want to create a war, it’s not right. It is not right.
AMY GOODMAN: The grandmother of one of the U.S. Army — the grandmother of one of the servicemen who was killed. In the last 30 seconds we have, Harrison Mann, when President Trump was asked on Air Force One about these latest six dead service members, he went — he said, “Next question.” He wouldn’t even answer it. The significance of the lack of support for this war at home, even among the military?
HARRISON MANN: Yeah, I think that’s the effect of really clear strategic and tactical negligence when it comes to putting our troops in harm’s way, right? Strategic negligence, like the very brave parents of this deceased pilot said, sending them into harm’s way for no good reason, no reason to really explain why their son died. And then, on the tactical level, we’ve also sent them to war without really obvious protections that could have saved lives. The first six service members who died were killed by a drone basically inside of a trailer — no overhead protection, no very rudimentary precautions that could have maybe saved their lives. So, unfortunately, Trump and Hegseth aren’t really hiding that they’re not concerned about how many lives they spend while they try to figure out what they’re doing in Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Harrison Mann, former U.S. Army major who resigned in 2024 from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s CIA, over the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza, now a senior fellow at Win Without War.
