More than a month into the conflict, Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson’s central warning is blunt: if Washington commits troops on Iranian soil, the result could be a military disaster on a scale policymakers appear unwilling to acknowledge.
By ScheerPost Staff
ScheerPost
In a stark and unsettling conversation on The Chris Hedges Report, journalist Chris Hedges sits down with retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson to confront a question now hanging over Washington’s war planning: Is the United States preparing to send ground forces into Iran?
The interview arrives at a moment when the American-Israeli war on Iran has already burned through massive military resources, destabilized global markets and failed to produce anything resembling a clear strategic victory. More than a month into the conflict, the central warning from Wilkerson is blunt: if Washington commits troops on Iranian soil, the result could be a military disaster on a scale policymakers appear unwilling to acknowledge.
Rather than describing the conflict as an isolated confrontation, Wilkerson places it inside a much larger geopolitical struggle — one tied to declining American economic leverage and the attempt to preserve dominance over global trade routes increasingly shaped by China. In his view, the war cannot be understood simply through the language of retaliation or deterrence; it reflects deeper anxieties inside an empire confronting limits it no longer knows how to manage.
That argument gives the interview its sharpest edge: the possibility that military escalation is being driven less by coherent strategy than by a collapsing political imagination in Washington.
Wilkerson, whose long military career included service under Colin Powell, argues that planners inside the Pentagon have historically understood the risks of a direct ground confrontation with Iran. Unlike previous wars launched under assumptions of rapid dominance, Iran presents terrain, manpower, regional alliances and retaliatory capacity that could quickly turn invasion into prolonged attrition.
The concern is not only battlefield cost. The interview points repeatedly to how the war is already redrawing global alignments. Iranian retaliation, regional uncertainty and threats to energy routes through the Persian Gulf have intensified fears of wider economic shock, with Wilkerson warning that continued escalation could accelerate conditions for a global depression.
One of the most alarming moments in the discussion centers on Israel. Both Hedges and Wilkerson raise concern that if Israeli leadership sees conventional military objectives slipping away, pressure could mount for far more extreme measures — including actions that would permanently transform the conflict and likely push Iran toward openly pursuing nuclear weapons.
That possibility exposes a contradiction running through Western war rhetoric: a campaign supposedly justified in the name of preventing escalation may instead be creating exactly the conditions for irreversible escalation.
Wilkerson’s proposed exit is politically simple but strategically difficult: declare victory and withdraw. Frame retreat as success before the conflict hardens into another generational war.
But he openly doubts whether the current administration possesses either the discipline or independence to do that. His most cutting remark suggests that many driving policy are not fully directing events themselves, but acting under pressures they neither control nor clearly explain.
The interview leaves viewers with a grim historical echo. From Vietnam War to Iraq War, American military history is crowded with conflicts entered under promises of control and exited under the weight of miscalculation.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that many of those lessons appear visible — and ignored.
The central force of the discussion is not prediction but warning: once a ground war begins, political leaders often lose the ability to shape where it ends.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This article is from ScheerPost.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The war in Vietnam was the result of the arrogance of the Ivy League educated Dems so well described in David Halberstam’s book The Best and the Brightest. Their heirs the neocon Ivy Ds of recent D administrations. Seems they learned nothing.
Now that the worst and the stupidest are in charge, what’s the chance this will go any better? But at least they’re visibly incompetent and immoral.
In Jungian terms, Trump represents the Shadow side of the U.S. What we want desperately to believe isn’t true of us progressives, intellectuals, and assorted nice people. Only of those Others whom we dislike so intensely. It’s not that Trump, the fundies, the war profiteers, and the econopaths are at all acceptable. They aren’t. Which can be can be argued rationally and empirically. It’s the refusal to see ourselves and our country as they really are. Why did D loyalists accept the D party elite dumping the New Deal and supporting neolib econopathy? How could they not see decades of suffering by the majority working class and the deaths of despair? Why don’t they acknowledge the State Dept. of the Biden admin was run by pro wars of empire neocons trained by Dick Cheney? Shadow repression.
Insanity (or at least neurosis) has been defined as doing the same thing over and over yet hoping for a different result. That wars will be just. That bailing out Wall St. will benefit everyone. That “no kings” demonstrations will get rid of the Rs and a D paradise will ensue. What Trump is doing now isn’t ex nihilo; these actions have been enabled by a long and troubled history.
Listening to Wilkerson, for me, produces two competing sensations: a placidity at hearing his calm clarity and manifest honesty of presentation…and terror at the content. These events could ripple unpredictably across the world and this country, impacting local levels in a historical instant.
I remember the first time I had this feeling of threatening danger, riding in a car as a teenager with older boys driving 80 – 100 mph; car barely in control with an unserious, inattentive driver. Not to put too fine a point on it, not different in any substantive way from the people pressing forward present geopolitical actions: then and now foolish, incompetent people (along with other more pathological conditions) have my life in their hands.