Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there was “no intelligence that showed an immediate and imminent threat.” He added: “That should normally be the criterion.”
Trump and his deputies are betting that America’s formidable air power will succeed and cripple Iran, reducing, if not eliminating, the threat once posed by a regime that has been a thorn in the side of the United States for nearly 50 years.
Underscoring the uncertainty and risks associated with the campaign, Trump and Hegseth refused to rule out the possibility of deploying ground troops to wage war against Iran. And even as the war’s effects spread across the region, with Iranian retaliatory attacks causing casualties in Israel and Arab states and sending oil prices soaring, Trump said the war could last at least four or five weeks or possibly longer.
“Whatever it takes,” the president said at a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on Monday.
When he ordered a one-day bombing raid on Iran in June, Trump said it was designed to prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb and later said the operation “wiped out” Tehran’s nuclear program.
But this time, Trump has backed a much larger attack on Iran with a list of ambitious targets that have raised questions about the prospects for success and the reasons for launching it.
In his speech posted online Saturday announcing the airstrike on Iran, Trump outlined several goals: preventing Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon, ensuring it cannot threaten the United States or its allies with ballistic missiles, degrading Tehran’s proxy forces, destroying its navy and triggering the collapse of the Iranian regime.
“The administration has set a pretty high bar” for success, said Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Some of the goals are within our reach, he said.
Waves of airstrikes by US and Israeli forces could seriously damage Iran’s missile arsenal, further damage its nuclear program and deal a blow to its navy, Cancian and other defense analysts said. It could weaken Iran for months or years, making the nation less of a danger to the United States and its allies in the region.
Some former civil servants and military officers said that operations were going reasonably well at this early stage; Iran’s retaliatory strikes had been largely diverted and there was a realistic chance of destroying much of Iran’s naval and missile assets.
But it is less clear how airstrikes alone would cause Iran to cut its support for its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon or Yemen, or whether attacking Iran’s leadership would cause the regime to crumble, as Trump has predicted, experts said.
Without armed opposition on the ground, airstrikes alone probably cannot topple a regime that has shown it is willing to gun down thousands of protesters, Iran experts and former intelligence officials said.
Trump, however, seems open to a scenario that played out in Venezuela in January, when after U.S. special forces captured the president, Nicolás Maduro, U.S. officials forged a pragmatic understanding with the vice president of the regime that succeeded Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez. Maduro and his wife are detained in the United States and have pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking conspiracy charges.
“I think what we did in Venezuela is the perfect, perfect scenario,” Trump told the New York Times.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, as his administration headed toward a possible invasion of Iraq, his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, warned of the dangers of toppling a regime, saying, “Once you break it, you own it.”
But Trump seems to have a different opinion: removing the leader of a regime does not have to impose any ownership burden.
He promised the Iranian people over the weekend that “the hour of your freedom is near,” telling them to “take control of your destiny and unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is within your reach. This is the time to act. Don’t let it pass you by.”
Iran’s government, with its Revolutionary Guard Corps as its backbone, is less malleable than Venezuela’s regime and will be opposed to capitulating to U.S. demands, according to Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Israel-based think tank Institute for National Security Studies.
“Iran is not Venezuela. There is no Delcy Rodríguez,” Citrinowicz said. “Iran does not rely on a major leader…No one in this regime will work with the United States, especially after Khamenei’s assassination.”
For the moment, Iran’s clerical regime appears determined to dig in and absorb blows from much more powerful adversaries, with the overall goal of clinging to power at all costs, former officials and analysts said.
Hegseth said Monday that the attack was not aimed at installing a new government and dismissed any parallels to the debilitating U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is not Iraq. This is not endless,” Hegseth said.
“Trump called the last 20 years of nation-building wars foolish, and he’s right,” Hegseth told reporters. “This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating and decisive mission: destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, not nuclear weapons.”
But Trump has kept his vision of victory ambiguous, failing to articulate exactly what a successful campaign would represent.
“There are a lot of results that are good,” Trump told NBC News on Sunday. “Number one is beheading them, getting rid of their entire group of murderers and thugs. And there are many, many results. We could do the short version or the longer version,” he said.
He did not give more details.
