Memo to Hegseth: Kharg Island is a Trap!

[punklawyer]

I'm Charles Carreon, punklawyer, here to deliver a little message to Pete Hegseth. Keep it simple, Kharg Island is a trap. Why? Well, let's think about first what it is. It's not just land. It's a fuel island, eight square miles in size, very small, that's holding currently estimated to be around 18 million barrels of crude, that's 750 million gallons of oil, spread it flat all around across the island, it would be over three feet deep. Well, what's the context? It's all happening -- Karg Island -- inside the Strait of Hormuz. Sun Tzu called something like the Strait of Hormuz intersecting ground. Why?

Because he who controls it controls the entire region and we know who controls it right now. The Ayatollah The Iranians missiles and drones just keep coming. So within this intersecting ground of the Strait of Hormuz, is Kharg Island? Kharg Island is... what Sun Tzu called entangling ground. It's ground where you can enter, but cannot easily leave. It is easy to desire, to control, if you just have like oil greed and no strategic sense. But it's very hard to take clean and really hard to keep because it's a toxic environment that can be made more dangerous by the departing defenders.

They can do things like place surveillance so that they can watch the invading forces and then they can detonate improvised devices as was done by the Iraqi resistance forces during the Iraq war, causing a lot of toxic injuries in addition to standard explosive shrapnel injuries and those are all going to happen when you turn a refinery into a war zone.

To even operate in that theater, soldiers need extra gear, masks, sensors, fire-resistant clothing. They move slower, they see less, they get separated from their units, they're endangered by toxic gas, they are going to probably suffer more casualties just from this toxified environment, which, will likely be weaponized by the departing defenders. So, this is clearly a trap. I'm not surprised that Trump would heedlessly lead soldiers to their death, well to order them to their death, hardly lead them. ⁓ But maybe Pete Hegseth can actually get together with some generals and think this through and not do it.