The ghosts of Baghdad and Kabul should be enough to silence any serious talk of sending American troops into Iran. Yet here we are again, with voices in Washington and Tel Aviv whispering that only boots on the ground can neutralize Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its local allies and its regional mischief.

They are wrong. An American invasion of Iran would be a strategic catastrophe, a moral failure and a self-inflicted wound from which the United States might never fully recover.  

First, the military and logistical reality is brutal. Iran is not Iraq in 2003. It is four times larger, with 90 million people, a professional military hardened by decades of sanctions and asymmetric warfare, and terrain that ranges from the Zagros Mountains to vast deserts perfectly suited for guerrilla warfare against invaders.  

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent years preparing for this scenario: mine-littered straits, drone swarms, missile barrages at Persian Gulf infrastructure, and a network of allies from Hezbollah to the Houthisready to ignite multiple fronts. The Pentagon’s wargames have shown that attacking Iran would fail, and requiring hundreds of thousands of troops, years of occupation, and casualties on a scale that would dwarf the post-9/11 wars.  

We already know how that movie ends — initial tactical (and TV-ready) success followed........

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