A former top U.S. general who commanded troops in Iraq is warning that President Trump’s strikes on Iran could plunge the region into “chaos.”
Retired United States Army Lieutenant General Mark Hertling said Monday that U.S. forces are conducting “precision strikes with great effects” but cautioned that external bombardment alone “can’t produce democratic change” and may “strengthen the hardliners” in Tehran.
“When we’re talking about, I think, the Middle East, which I’m very familiar with and have a whole lot of scar tissue in, what I conclude is external strikes alone can’t produce democratic change. We’ve seen that in multiple conflicts,” he told MS Now.
“We saw it in Desert Storm when 45 days of airstrikes was followed up by a ground campaign. If you don’t have something to put in place afterwards, it’s going to be even tougher than what we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, because these strikes in the Middle East will usually strengthen the hardliners. It’s going to create further chaos,” he added.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
It comes after U.S. and Israeli forces launched a major unprovoked coordinated air campaign against Iran over the weekend, marking a significant escalation in the region.
The strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, prompting retaliatory attacks on several other countries in the Middle East.
Trump justified Saturday’s “major combat operations” against Iran by arguing Tehran had rebuffed efforts to curb its nuclear program despite saying last year that the U.S military had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, and it would take “years” to rebuild.
Four U.S. military personnel have been killed in the strikes so far. And in a video statement released by the White House on Sunday, Trump warned that “sadly, there will likely be more before it ends.”
With casualties mounting and no clear off-ramp in sight, Trump is facing growing demands to define his endgame in Iran. The president, who returned to office promising to end America’s so-called “forever wars,” has instead pledged sustained “heavy and pinpoint bombing” for days on end, insisting the campaign will continue until the U.S. achieves what he calls “our objective of peace” in the Middle East.
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected comparisons to costly past entanglements, saying Operation Epic Fury is not an “endless war” but a “clear, devastating, decisive mission.” Yet the administration has not publicly detailed what victory would look like — or how the fighting would stop.
Lawmakers and foreign policy experts warn that without a defined strategy, the U.S. could drift into the kind of drawn-out conflict Trump once vowed to avoid.
“Where does this all go?” Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, told NPR. “We can bomb Iran along with the Israelis for, you know, lengthy period of time, but in the service of what?
“Is the intention regime change? Because there aren’t many examples either of regime change affected through bombing, or, quite frankly, of American military forces actually doing regime change in a way that is satisfactory.”
But for now, the United States has yet to spell out a plan for what comes next in Iran.
So far, Republican lawmakers have opposed deploying U.S. ground forces to Iran. “There’s no simple answer for what’s going to come next,” SennTom Cotton, the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from Arkansas, said on CBS News.
“You know, this idea, ‘You break it, you own it,’ I don’t buy that one bit,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a key ally of Trump, said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “This is not Iraq. This is not Germany. This is not Japan. We’re going to free the people up from a terrorist regime.”
Graham added that it is not the president’s job to have a plan in place for Iran.
“It’s not his job or my job to do this. How many times do I have to tell you? Our job is to make sure Iran is no longer the largest state sponsor of terrorism. To help the people reconstruct a new government. No boots on the ground,” he said.
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