Why Trump can’t get his story straight on Iran

Donald Trump needed time to sell his war on Iran to the American people.

The isolationist Maga base that elected Mr Trump on his promise to stay out of foreign wars would need to be persuaded through consistent and effective messaging. This would take, the White House wagered, until April or late March at the earliest.

Enter Benjamin Netanyahu, with high-level intelligence pinpointing a building in Tehran that, if struck at the right time, would see Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and tens of other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders eliminated.

The rare meeting between Khamenei and his inner circle in a single room would be a fleeting opportunity, Mr Netanyahu would have stressed during his phone call with Mr Trump on Feb 23. It provided a chance to kill Khamenei and most of the regime’s higher command with a single blow.

For weeks, the administration had sent mixed signals about how far it was willing to go, dispatching a large armada to the region while continuing to tout its desire to force Iran to comply through diplomacy.

Yet that tightrope-walking ended abruptly when Mr Netanyahu called the US president, offering up Khamenei. Since that deadly strike, the administration’s confused justifications for waging war on Iran have left allies and Americans with little clarity.

When announcing Operation Epic Fury in a nationwide address filmed at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, the president framed the attack as a defensive necessity.

“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” he told Americans, wearing a white baseball cap adorned with USA in large lettering.

However, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, complicated matters when he said on Monday that the US joined the war because it knew Israel was about to strike.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Mr Rubio told reporters at the Capitol. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them [Iran] before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

The explanation shook Washington because it sounded as though Israel had bounced the US into war, an interpretation Mr Trump has since denied.

“I might have forced [Israel’s] hand,” if anything, Mr Trump said on Tuesday. Mr Rubio later insisted that his remarks had been taken out of context. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, said Israel and the US were left with no choice but to attack the Iranian regime.

“Israel was determined to act in their own defence here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deemed to be an existential threat,” he said.

“If Iran had begun to fire all of their missile arsenal, short and mid-range missiles at our personnel and our assets and our installations, we would have suffered staggering losses.”

During a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in December, Mr Netanyahu reportedly asked for the president’s approval for Israel to hit Iran’s missile sites in the coming months.

By the middle of January, the Pentagon was in no position to wage a lengthy war in the Middle East, according to the New York Times. There were no aircraft carriers in the region and the bases scattered across the Middle East were low on missiles for their air defences.

On Jan 14, in one of Mr Netanyahu’s 15 calls to the president in the weeks before the war, he is said to have asked the president to delay any military action until later in the month, when Israel’s defence preparations were complete. By the middle of February, the Pentagon had put in place a force that could sustain a military campaign of several weeks.

At the same time, Steve Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, were holding indirect nuclear talks with the Iranians under orders from Mr Trump.

Mr Trump dispatched the pair to Geneva with four aims: Iran could not have a nuclear bomb, the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites must be closed; Iran could not be a provocateur for proxies, and it could not possess any intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Then, Mr Netanyahu had made his call to the president, telling him that Israel had intelligence showing the regime’s senior leadership was gathering with Khamenei. A CIA assessment, conducted at Mr Trump’s direction, confirmed the Mossad report, according to Axios.

Preparations accelerated as Mr Trump told the Israeli prime minister he would consider moving forward, but first came the president’s State of the Union address the following night.

The US president appeared to be trying to sell his case for the legal and political justification for action before congressmen and senators, many of whom have been reluctant to risk another foreign war.

But Mr Trump told congress he preferred a diplomatic solution, making the strikes that would occur just days later all the more perplexing to political watchers and ordinary Americans alike.

By Feb 26, hours before the war began, Iran presented the US with a nuclear agreement that had more holes than “Swiss cheese”.

Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner left the talks unimpressed. US intelligence feared Iran could enrich uranium from 20 per cent to 90 per cent, which is considered weapons-grade, in as little as a month. The material could then be used to build a nuclear bomb.

By that evening, Mr Trump faced a decision that proved to be the defining moment of his second term so far. The accelerated timeline left the administration flatfooted. Rather than spending weeks building the public case for war as planned, the White House found itself rushing to justify the strike that it has already sanctioned.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]