The man who helped break Iraq is advising the White House to do it again. On an island. With Marines. He calls it a “no-brainer.” He’s half right.
Dr. Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a former official of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority—the organization that dissolved the Iraqi army, disbanded the Ba’ath Party, created the insurgency, and produced a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. He has a PhD from Yale. He has written books about the Middle East. His recommendations on seizing Kharg Island have been circulated within the National Security Council. He is reportedly advising Trump administration officials directly.
His plan, published at AEI and amplified across the think-tank circuit, is this: seize Kharg Island, Iran’s oil terminal, which handles ninety percent of Iranian crude exports. Cut the revenue. The IRGC can’t make payroll. The regime fractures. He called it a “no-brainer.” He compared it favorably to a 1979 plan from Admiral James “Ace” Lyons. Lyons is dead. His plan should be too.
The Geography Dr. Rubin Forgot
Kharg Island sits five hundred miles past the Strait of Hormuz—the same strait the US Navy currently considers too dangerous to transit with surface combatants. It is fifteen miles off the Iranian coast. It is five miles long. It has a civilian population. It is within range of every rocket, artillery tube, shore-based anti-ship missile, drone, and naval mine that Iran has not yet used in this war.
Harrison Mann, a former Army major who specialized in Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, called the plan what it is: somewhere between a suicide mission and a self-imposed hostage crisis. The Marines would need multiple helicopter rotations to insert. Iranian gunners would have time to calibrate between trips. And as Mann noted, getting troops onto the island is dangerous. Getting them off is worse.
This is the Bonfire thesis made flesh. Dino Garner published The Billion-Dollar Bonfire in CRUCIBEL on February 8: cheap drones destroy expensive platforms at cost-exchange ratios that make the math suicidal for the defender. Kharg Island would be the most expensive drone target range in military history. Every helicopter on approach, every Osprey touching down, every supply ship threading the strait would be a hundred-million-dollar target for a thousand-dollar drone. Rubin’s “no-brainer” is a bonfire with Marines in it.
The Institutional Memory That Doesn’t Exist
This is the same man. The same institution. The same methodology. AEI provided the intellectual scaffolding for the Iraq invasion. The Coalition Provisional Authority, where Rubin served, executed the occupation. The occupation created ISIS. Twenty years and a trillion dollars later, the architect walks into the next war and proposes the same structural logic—remove one node, the system collapses—on a smaller island with a bigger adversary.
CRUCIBEL published The Kingpin Fallacy on March 22: How America Built a Fifty-Year Strategy Around Killing Leaders Who Are Designed to Be Replaced. Rubin’s Kharg plan is the economic version of the same delusion. Cut the revenue and the regime falls—as though the IRGC, which has survived forty years of sanctions, eight years of war with Iraq, and the assassination of its supreme leader, will surrender because it missed a paycheck. Iran built a nearly self-sufficient defense industry precisely because it expected its oil revenue to be targeted. Rubin is proposing to cut a limb the patient already learned to live without.
But the plan doesn’t need to be sound. It needs to be simple enough for a briefing slide. “Seize the island. Cut the oil. Regime collapses.” Three sentences. One PowerPoint. Zero understanding of what happens on day two. This is how Iraq started. This is how every American strategic disaster of the last fifty years started—with a credentialed expert, a confident assertion, and a plan that fit on one page because the second page was where the problems lived.
The Invoice
Dr. Rubin has a PhD from Yale, a fellowship at AEI, a directorship at the Middle East Forum, a publication list as long as a carrier deck, and access to the National Security Council. He has everything a defense intellectual needs except the thing that matters: the memory of what happens when his advice is taken. He helped build the Coalition Provisional Authority. He watched it fail. He is now advising the same structural approach to a harder problem in a more dangerous theater, and he is calling it a “no-brainer.”
No-brainer. The word does more work than Dr. Rubin realizes. A plan conceived without a brain is precisely what it sounds like. The Marines he wants to send to Kharg Island have brains. They also have families. They deserve better than a Yale PhD’s cocktail napkin pitched to a president who wants a made-for-television victory on an island he’s been fantasizing about since 1998.
Dr. Rubin broke Iraq from a desk. He should not be allowed to break Iran from the same chair.
Broke. As. Fuck.
RESONANCE
Garner, D. (2026). “The Billion-Dollar Bonfire: How a $99 Toy Turns a Trillion-Dollar Fleet to Ash.” CRUCIBEL. https://crucibeljournal.com/the-billion-dollar-bonfire-how-a-99-toy-turns-a-trillion-dollar-fleet-to-ash/. Summary:Argues that the cost-exchange ratio between commercial drones and high-value platforms constitutes an existential vulnerability for Western military forces.
Garner, D. (2026). “The Kingpin Fallacy: How America Built a Fifty-Year Strategy Around Killing Leaders Who Are Designed to Be Replaced.” CRUCIBEL. https://crucibeljournal.com/the-kingpin-fallacy/. Summary: Demonstrates that decapitation strategies fail against adversaries whose command structures are designed to survive the loss of any single node.
Mann, H. (2026). “Seizing Iran’s ‘Crown Jewel’ Would Be a Suicide Mission.” Responsible Statecraft. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/kharg-island-iran/. Summary: Former Army major and DIA Middle East analyst dismantles the Kharg Island seizure proposal on tactical, operational, and strategic grounds.
Rubin, M. (2026). “‘Take the Oil’: Seizing the Kharg Island Terminal Is the Ultimate Checkmate to Iran.” American Enterprise Institute. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/take-the-oil-seizing-the-kharg-island-terminal-is-the-ultimate-checkmate-to-iran/. Summary: Proposes US seizure of Kharg Island to cut Iranian oil revenue and force regime collapse, recycling a 1979 plan rejected by the Carter administration.
Waller, A. (2026). “Deterrence or Escalation? What the Surge of US Troops Might Mean in Iran.” The Christian Science Monitor. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2026/0401/trump-iran-war-troops-kharg. Summary:Reports that Rubin’s Kharg Island recommendations have been circulated within the National Security Council and that Marine expeditionary units are en route to the Gulf.