Neocon Levin Falsely Says Neocons Didn’t Advocate Troops on Ground in Iran.

Top neoconservative commentator Mark Levin attempted to deny today that he and his ideological bedmates had advocated American troops on the ground in Iran. But alas and alack, X users offered video that shows “The Great One” himself advocating exactly that.

Levin denies it, of course, but that aside, he asked readers for a list of the neocons who advocate troops on the ground.

Answer: Fellow neocons Ben Shapiro, the podcaster; and the late Israel First GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, who suggested that the Marines should land on Kharg Island because they landed on Iwo Jima in World War II.

Meanwhile, other neocons are fretting that the war is lost, along with November’s midterms, because Trump’s No. 1 priority since the terms began has blown up in his face.

“You did, Numbskull”

Levin posted the question this morning X, wanting to know who the neocons were who advocated boots on the ground.

“I heard it mentioned again last evening and it’s thrown around by the Woke Reich isolationists,” he fumed, possibly before he took his medications:

“It must be a long list so let’s see it.”

Thus did the “receipts,” as they say, come pouring in.

A Newsman reprised a Newsweek article with this headline: Mark Levin Calls for Troops in Iran — After Trump Plugged His Show.

Explaining that Trump never promised no troops on the ground, Levin asked a question: “why would we need troops on the ground?”

“Well, there’s a lot of reasons, and we wouldn’t need 300,000 of them,” said the Israel First podcaster who fights the wars he advocates from behind a Fox News microphone:

It’s this uranium, too. We’ve got to get the uranium. If it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we gotta get it for the reason I just said. You could make dirty bombs and over time you can still make sophisticated missiles. So you need to get to the uranium. That’s why I’m reading in the paper we’re talking about the 82nd Airborne, we’re talking about these very special forces in the various military services, and so forth.… Not talking about sending regular army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands.

Levin said special forces are “trained for moments like this.”

Answering Levin’s entreaty to identify the neocons who advocate or advocated troops on the ground, user Cyn obliged: “You did, numbskull.”

“Bro…,” wrote former GOP Representative Matt Gaetz over a screenshot of the Newsweek piece.

“Mark, the list starts and ends with the guy who spent March floating the 82nd Airborne and special forces to dig uranium out of Iranian mountains because “‘airstrikes alone can’t finish the job,’” another wrote.

Other Boots-on-the-Ground Advocates

But Levin isn’t the only neocon who has advocated boots on the ground.

So also did fellow neocon podcaster Ben Shapiro. While urging a brutal war on Iran, he breezily opined Americans would happily accept the mass casualties a ground war would entail.

“There’s this bizarre notion in foreign policy that the American people are deeply worried about the immediate cost of war to the enemy, that the American people, we can’t handle the ugliness of war for even a day, that every conflict has to be totally antiseptic,” Shapiro said:

And here I’m not even talking about the American willingness to undergo casualties. No one in America wants American casualties, it’s a tragedy and a horror. We do understand that war does come along with casualties, and we are willing to undergo those casualties in pursuit of an end and a victory for America. But as far as the idea that, for example, America, we can’t hit Kharg Island because the Iranian people would then be deprived of oil resources, the American people are, I should say, not particularly concerned about that. 

We are far more concerned with why we’re there, not winning. I think what we actually ought to do is say an eye for everything. Like, you touch a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and we kill the head of the IRGC … we kill your entire leadership class. Again, we destroy South Pars and we strike hard. One drone, and that’s what happens. That is the way you win in the Middle [East], by the way, the way you win generally.

In other words, Trump must commit ground troops to the war because Americans are “willing to undergo those casualties.”

Shapiro, 42, has not yet enlisted in the U.S. Army or Marine Corps to ensure that he’s in the fight if President Trump commits ground troops.

Graham was another boots-on-the-ground fanatic. Speaking to Fox News hostess Shannon Bream, Graham pushed for sending the Marines to Kharg Island.

Bream asked whether U.S. troops would fight in Iran, and cited a piece in the far-left Atlantic, which reported that taking Kharg Island wouldn’t be all that easy. It would be a “grinding war of attrition,” the article said. As well, said the magazine, “Iran has given every indication that it would likely escalate by striking oil-and-gas facilities in the region, just as it did to Qatar and Saudi Arabia after the Pars South gas field was struck.”

“I’m sorta tired of all his armchair quarterbacking,” armchair quarterback Graham told Bream.

“This has been an amazing military operation.… I trust the Marines, not [the Atlantic author],” Graham said:

I trust [the Department of Defense]. We’ve got two Marine Expeditionary Units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima. We can do this. My money is always on the Marines.

Neocons: We Lost

Troops on the ground or not, one top neocon has confessed that war is lost. Commentary editor John Podhoretz expostulated at length yesterday on a podcast with the magazine’s staffers. The war, Podhoretz concluded, has ruined Trump and the Republicans come November.

“His poll numbers stink, the war’s poll numbers stink, the war’s poll numbers are starting to stink among Republicans,” he said:

This is the major commitment of his first term, and it’s failing. And so he and the Republicans are going into the midterm elections with absolutely no positive case to be made about the last two years of governance, aside from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill.…

His [poll] numbers everywhere are bad. And in the end, this is all going to be the fault of refusing to do the right things to win the war, because winning the war would have all sorts of ancillary benefits.… [A] surge of national pride sense that, you know, a country’s monstrous regime has been ended, and that the people there have been liberated from its horrible yoke, even if you don’t quite know what’s going to come next.…

But losing [the war] is the end of everything. I literally don’t know what he goes and tells the American people or what Republicans go and tell the American people that they should be brought back into the control of the Senate and hold the House, except that the Democrats are crazy socialists who are evil.… [B]ut that’s not a case for the Republicans.… [If] this war ends with Iran with the acceptance that Iran has some sway or control over the Strait of Hormuz … we lost the war.

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, replied. “Every time the neocons fail, which is every single time they do anything, they tell us it was everybody’s fault but theirs because true neoconservatism has never really been tried,” he wrote:

If only true neoconservatism had been tried, they would’ve won.