WSJ (“Trump Privately Approved of Attack Plans for Iran but Has Withheld Final Order“):
President Trump told senior aides late Tuesday that he approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran would abandon its nuclear program, three people familiar with the deliberations said.
Since his private instructions in the White House Situation Room to the military, Trump has disclosed publicly that an attack is an option.
“I have ideas on what to do but I haven’t made a final—I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due,” he told reporters Wednesday.
Trump is hoping that threatening to join Israel’s strikes on Iran, which continued for a sixth day, will compel Tehran to meet his demands, the people said. He acknowledged that a U.S. attack was under consideration but said he still might decide against it.
A senior White House official said multiple options remain on the table, and that Trump would continue to watch how the Israelis operate.
Israel began its airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, military leadership and other targets last week, dubbing the mission “Operation Rising Lion.” The Israeli military has struck more than 1,100 targets in Iran, including eight Iranian attack helicopters at a military base and 40 missile-infrastructure components in western Iran on Tuesday.
At the Pentagon, officials said the administration was considering options for conducting an attack on Iran but the president hadn’t given a final order. So far the U.S. has limited its military role to assisting Israel in defending against Iranian missiles and drones, officials say.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine attended a meeting at the White House on Wednesday afternoon after testifying on Capitol Hill in the morning, according to a defense official.
While planning for a potential strike has progressed, Trump might prefer to resolve the crisis diplomatically, people familiar with his thinking said.
“I may do it, I may not do it,” he also told reporters Wednesday, repeating his demand for Iran’s unconditional surrender: “The next week is going to be very big, maybe less than a week.”
Other outlets have similar reports, seemingly based mostly on this one. At first read, it sounds as if Trump has approved a specific plan, but simply hasn’t decided whether to green light it. But it also sounds like multiple options are still on the table, which means no specific plan has been approved. Beats the hell out of me.
WaPo (“Navigating Iran crisis, Trump relies on experience over star power“) purports to take us inside the decision process:
As President-elect Donald Trump assembled his core national security team early this year, congressional and media attention fell on two choices better known for their Fox News appearances and invective against a supposed “deep state” than for their executive branch experience: Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon. Both won Senate confirmation, barely.
But as Trump faces a critical decision about whether to join Israel’s military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps the most momentous of his presidency, neither Gabbard nor Hegseth are playing starring roles as members of Trump’s inner circle of advisers, according to current and former U.S. officials and people close to the White House.
Trump instead has turned to a small group of lower-key but more experienced aides, these people said. The “Tier One” group advising on a potential U.S. strike on Iran is composed of Vice President JD Vance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, according to an outside White House adviser, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics.
Together, this quartet is helping Trump as he decides whether to launch weapons only the United States possesses to target nuclear enrichment sites in Iran. Since Friday, Israel has bombed a number of Iranian nuclear sites but been unable to destroy deeply buried uranium enrichment facilities at Fordow and Natanz. U.S. strikes would bring Washington into a new Middle East war with uncertain consequences, invite Iran’s promised retaliation against U.S. military bases in the region and potentially roil the global economy.
Other reports indicate that CENTCOM honcho Eric Kurilla is a key player, which makes sense. Then again,
“The president changes his position so quickly that it is hard to keep anybody in the loop,” said Sen. Jack Reed, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I’m sure he’s not calling any of his advisers at 1 o’clock in the morning when he says ‘unconditional surrender’ and things like that. That’s one of the problems.”
Spokespeople for Gabbard and Hegseth disputed that the two were not fully engaged in advising Trump.
The president, who often operates on gut instinct, also is navigating the crisis without many of the support structures his predecessors have leaned on. Last month, the White House dismissed scores of professional staffers at the National Security Council, which coordinates U.S. security agencies to assess and prepare options for the president. Rubio is also serving as Trump’s national security adviser after predecessor Michael Waltz was pushed aside.
Trump has imposed deep cuts on other arms of government, including the State Department and international broadcast operations that predecessors have used to reach foreign populations. In one telling example, about 75 employees of the Voice of America, mostly from its Persian news division, were recalled from administrative leave last Friday amid the escalating warfare between Israel and Iran.
A President is entitled to take advice from anyone he wants, or from no one. Ultimately, it’s their call. But there’s a reason most have relied on a deep bench of experienced hands and well-established institutional processes. Bad decisions can be made following good staff work, but it’s nearly impossible to make good ones without the best available information and analysis.
NYT national security correspondent David Sanger states the obvious in “U.S. Strike on Iran Would Bring Risks at Every Turn.”
It sounds so surgical, so precise, exactly the kind of air attack that only the U.S. Air Force can execute.
A series of B-2 bombers lifts off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri or the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Refueled in the air, they head for a remote mountain in north-central Iran, far from civilians, where they get Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear site, Fordo, in their sights.
They drop their giant 30,000-pound bunker-busters, one after another, blasting a giant hole down to the centrifuge halls that have been in the bull’s-eye of the American military since President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain and France revealed the existence of the plant in the fall of 2009, charging Iran with a great “deception.”
Few potential operations, with the possible exception of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, have been so examined, rehearsed and debated. Technically, the military and geological experts say, it should be doable.
And yet it is full of risks — known unknowns and unknown unknowns, as the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to say in the context of the Iraq War, another rabbit hole of American military action in the Middle East. That is why it has given pause to every American president who has looked at it for the past 16 years.
[…]
Meanwhile, the Iranians, after five days of remarkable losses to the Israelis, seemed to be looking for a way out. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a defiant response to Mr. Trump’s call for “unconditional surrender,” but Mr. Trump said there were indications that the Iranians wanted to talk, and reports of an official Iranian plane landing in Oman, where many of the negotiations with Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, had taken place before Israel’s attack.
If Mr. Trump is taking a pause, it may be because the list of things that could go wrong is long, and probably incomplete. There’s the obvious: It’s possible that a B-2 could get shot down, despite Israel’s success of taking out so many of Iran’s air defenses. It’s possible the calculations are wrong, and even America’s biggest conventional bomb can’t get down that deep.
“I’ve been there, it’s half a mile underground,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week, as the Israeli operation began.
But assuming that the operation itself is successful, the largest perils may lie in the aftermath, many experts say, just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many lessons from that ugly era of misbegotten American foreign policy, but the most vital may be that it’s the unknown unknowns that can come back to bite.
Iran has vowed that if attacked by American forces, it would strike back, presumably against the American bases spread around the Middle East and the growing number of assets gathering in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. All are within missile range, assuming Iran has missiles and launchers left after the Israelis are done with their systematic targeting.
Of course, that could start a cycle of escalation: If Americans are killed, or even injured, Mr. Trump will be under pressure to exact revenge.
“Subcontracting the Fordo job would put the United States in Iran’s sights,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Steven N. Simon, a veteran of the National Security Council, wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday. “Iran would almost certainly retaliate by killing American civilians. That, in turn, would compel the United States to reciprocate.”
“Soon enough,” they continued, “the only targets left for Washington to hit would be the Iranian regime’s leaders, and the United States would again go into the regime-change business — a business in which exceedingly few Americans want to be involved any longer.”
The reaction could take other forms. Iran is skilled at terrorism, and reacted to the U.S.-Israeli cyber attack on its nuclear program 15 years ago by building a fearsome cyber corps, not as stealthy as China’s or as bold as Russia’s, but capable of considerable damage. And it has plenty of short-range missiles left to attack oil tankers, making transit in the Persian Gulf too risky.
The last thing the White House wants to do is air these risks in public. Democrats are calling for a congressional role, but they have no power to compel it. “Given the potential for escalation, we must be brought into this decision,” Senator Adam B. Schiff of California, one of Mr. Trump’s political rivals, said on CNN on Wednesday. “Bombing Fordo would be an offensive activity.”
And like most offensive activities, there are longer-term perils, beyond the cycle of attack and retaliation.
Given how weak Iran is, I’m skeptical that joining the Israeli attack (beyond the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance help we’re presumably providing) is warranted. A return to something like JCPOA, with robust international inspections, is surely possible. We were able to secure that when Iran’s proxies were much more powerful and when the only stick was economic sanctions.
I’m also skeptical that dropping a bunker buster on Natanz would end our involvement. Such a blatant act of war would surely be met with attacks on American installations in the region, which we would have to respond to with a dramatic show of force. Regime change would be the logical end to that cycle and, therefore, the logical initial war aim. And there is no guarantee that a follow-on regime would be more moderate—especially when it came to power in the aftermath of a joint American-Israeli attack.
