Iran War: Actionable Intelligence
Now we know why it started when it did.
Marc Caputo and Bark Ravid, reporting for Axios (“Exclusive: The Trump-Netanyahu call that changed the Middle East“):
Last Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Trump with a stunning tip: Iran’s supreme leader and his top advisers were all set to meet at one location in Tehran on Saturday morning. They could all be killed in a single devastating airstrike, Netanyahu told Trump and his team, according to three sources briefed on the discussion.
The Feb. 23 call — held from the White House Situation Room and unreported until now — was a pivotal moment that set the Iran war in motion. It answers the question that lawmakers, MAGA skeptics and world leaders have all been asking since Saturday: why now?
The answer: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle were irresistible targets of opportunity that neither Trump nor Netanyahu wanted to pass up.
Trump was already leaning toward striking Iran before learning the new intelligence about Khamenei. What he hadn’t decided was when — until Netanyahu called.
The Feb. 23 call was part of months of intensive coordination between the two leaders, who met twice and spoke by phone 15 times in the two months leading to the war, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
The U.S. and Israel had considered striking a week earlier than Saturday, but postponed for intelligence and operational reasons, including bad weather.An initial CIA check, conducted at Trump’s direction, confirmed the information about Khamenei gathered by Israeli military intelligence.
Preparations accelerated as Trump told Netanyahu he would consider moving forward — but first came the president’s State of the Union address the following night. U.S. officials said Trump made a “deliberate decision” not to focus excessively on Iran so as not to spook the ayatollah and drive him underground before the strike could be executed.
By Thursday, the CIA had fully “confirmed that these people were all going to be together, and we needed to take advantage of it,” a source said.
That same day, Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff called from Geneva after hours of talks with Iranian officials and delivered a blunt verdict: negotiations were going nowhere. “If you decide you want to do diplomacy, we will push and fight to get a deal. But these guys showed us they weren’t willing to make the deal you will be satisfied with,” a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the call said Trump was told.
Trump was now convinced of two things: the intelligence was solid, and diplomacy was dead. On Friday at 3:38 p.m. EST, he gave the final order.
Eleven hours later, bombs fell on Tehran, Khamenei was killed and the war had begun.
This explains not only the timing but also why Iran was barely mentioned in the SOTU speech. Certainly, if Trump was already leaning toward an attack, the opportunity to decapitate the top of the chain of command in one fell swoop was irresistible.
I remain skeptical that the negotiations were real. Given that Trump himself pulled out of JCPOA and re-initiated sanctions, Iranian officials had little incentive to trust any promises made by U.S. officials. And I don’t know what it is they could have realistically offered, anyway, that was substantially better than what they had conceded in that deal.
And, of course, I’m still skeptical that there’s a plan for a better state of the peace. I shed no tears for Khamanei and his gang of thugs. But who will replace them? The exiled crown prince? Some lower-ranking member of the current regime?
Now that we have established that assassination of a nation’s leader (and leaders) is an acceptable norm for international relations what does that mean for the world order going forward?
Not willing to make a deal YOU WILL BE SATISFIED WITH. So Trump takes an unreasonable position and won’t budge, and his real estate developers, er, envoys, give him cover by telling him it is Iran that is negotiating in bad faith. And with that, Trump sets a match to the Middle East.
Has there ever been a POTUS so easily manipulated?
@Charley in Cleveland: I might be getting hung up on something that is nothing, but I note it’s not “a deal,” it’s “THE deal.”
To me, this reads as there was something very specific they were pushing for, that they likely knew was a no-go.
Deleted by site moderators
@Jen: Agree 100%…it was THE deal, and was undoubtedly a poison pill. There isn’t much the Trump administration does that isn’t done in bad faith.
Called it
@Kathy: Honestly, the “Bibi’s puppet” explanation seems wrong here. Trump makes his own decisions and doesn’t always support Netanyahu. But Bibi is really good at setting up “deals” that Trump can’t pass up. He agreed to MIDNIGHT HAMMER because months of IDF strikes softening Iranian IADs had made the facilities a ripe target. Confirmed intelligence of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decapitate the regime was just too good to pass up.
Yesterday Marco Rubio tried to walk back his comments to reporters on Monday, when he very clearly said that the US had to strike at that time because “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.”
@James Joyner:
Decapitate a country you’re not at war with?
Well, today’s NYT … now it’s Equador. It’s behind a pay wall.
‘A joint military operation with Ecuador will target what the the administration called “designated terrorist organizations” in the country.’
@Kathy: I don’t think that’s a distinction he makes. He sees regimes in Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba as having long been a pain in the ass and thinks that presidents before him who didn’t take action were weak. That he doesn’t have a follow-through plan is only a problem for people who care about such things.
@James Joyner: I also think he is dumb enough to think that taking out a leader solves whatever problem he thinks exists.
I am still truly amazed that they think removing Maduro “solves” Venezuela.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It works in the movies, doesn’t it?
@James Joyner:
Obama had taken action, negotiating the JCPOA with Iran and moving to normalize relations with Cuba. Obama thought we had tools other than hammers and was looking long term. Trump is incapable of either. Plus he wanted to erase anything the Black guy had done.
It’s the disease of wanting to “win”, without thinking through what win means. As you say, the long term is only a problem for those who care about such things. This will make Trump look “strong” and the spit probably won’t hit the fan until after Nov.
@Kathy: It does, at least at the moment, look like Ayatollah Khameni is dead, long live Ayatollah Khameni.
The way Trump’s brain works and the fact that he’s surrounding by morons, liars, and Evangelicals makes me think that if this drags on America will end up using nukes.
@James Joyner:
Followed by EPIC FURY. If nothing else comes of this could we get back to unpretentious code names like “Overlord” or “Market Garden”?
Let’s not ignore nor forget the actual Army Reservists who died early in this war:
@Kathy: You will appreciate the post I just wrote.
This concentration of Iranian leaders may have determined the exact hour of the US strike, but the movement of large amounts of troops and war ships required weeks of planning and staging. The attacks were coming in any event. That’s how it looks to me.
BTW: this is giving Trump a pass. Regardless of when we were going to attack, or even IF we were going to attack, Trump owed the public more than he gave in the SOTU (and beyond the SOTU).
@Steven L. Taylor:
Zahn’s 90s New Trilogy says the war continued for years, albeit more in a mopping up operation kind of way. Until Thrawn 1.0 showed up, and threatened to defeat the nascent New Republic.
Far more realistic than what passes for major foreign policy in DC these days of mass stupidity.
I feel quite sure that Ali Khamenei and his aides all felt that they were doing what was best for Iran and the Iranian people.
To me, this is a cautionary tale. A warning to not be so certain of one’s own righteousness. To be collaborative rather than dictatorial. My idea of “what’s best” is often quite different from other people. I might want to lead them, to persuade them, but that’s a different thing than what Khamenei, and his counterparts (ahem) elsewhere.
It isn’t people we need to kill, it is ideas. There are times when killing people is necessary, but those times are much rarer than the times we do kill people, thinking that the ideas will take care of themselves.
@gVOR10: OVERLORD and MARKET GARDEN were code names designed to keep operations secret while in the planning phase. I’m not sure when we started using public-facing propaganda names. JUST CAUSE (the 1989 Panama invasion) is the first that comes to mind, but DESERT SHIELD/STORM, PROVIDE COMFORT, ENDURING FREEDOM, IRAQI FREEDOM, etc., have been a thing for decades now.
Panama is my best guess. The 1986 Libya raid was EL DORADO CANYON, so still the old cipher-based codename. It was followed by a host of others similarly named: EARNEST WILL, PRAYING MANTIS, GOLDEN PHEASANT, and PRIME CHANCE.
EDIT: It was in fact Panama. Using the traditional random system, it was BLUE SPOON. The CENTCOM CO asked, “Do you want your grandchildren to say you were in Blue Spoon?”
Amusingly, the Brits were decades ahead of him:
@Steven L. Taylor: I definitely think he should have made a public-facing case for the war, both to Congress and the citizenry, ahead of time. But if his decision-making was accelerated based on intelligence of one specific meeting being the target of opportunity, I get not tipping his hand. There’s no justification at all for not having a much more detailed speech on the war since its inception.
@James Joyner: Oh, cool story. Both about the CENTCOM CO and Churchill.
However, they could have just “rerolled” the name. Use the same process to generate a name that wasn’t BLUE SPOON. I mean MARKET GARDEN isn’t terrible, after all.
@James Joyner:
iirc the British side of the 1991 Iraq War was called Operation GRANBY.
The Falklands campaign was CORPORATE.
The British military develops severe eye-rolling syndrome at US “big it up” operational names.
I have some doubts.
The driving ideology of the Iranian regime was not Iranian nationalism, still less the material welfare of the people of Iran.
Doutbtless they thought their motives were for the besst, in the larger perspective.
But let’s not forget: the Nazis were quite convinced they were the “good guys”.
As for killing ideas and the relation to killing people: killing a lot of peoople was probably quite integral to the killing of the ideas on which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan operated.
Regarding the “operationl intelligence” angle, I’ve had a suspicion that might have been the trigger
.