The Trump administration can't align on a reason for going to war with Iran
The Trump administration's rationale for the US-Israeli war on Iran has been inconsistent at best, and incoherent at worst.
In what appeared to be a contradiction of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's remarks just one day earlier, President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that "if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand" into a war on Iran.
"It was my opinion that [Iran was] going to attack first... based on the way the negotiation was going," he said.
But from Oman's standpoint - a reliable US ally that served as a mediator - the negotiations were in fact going too well. Iran, the Omani foreign minister said, had offered up concessions that were never even included in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
"It’s clear that his (Trump's) negotiators were not prepared and did not have a clear objective that they were trying to achieve, and it’s not clear that anyone really took this process seriously,” Jeffrey Prescott, a former US diplomat and former national security aide to Vice President Joe Biden, told Middle East Eye.
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Prescott says Trump's use of force against Iran is "unconnected" to a grand strategy about the aftermath of that action and has displayed a "remarkable lack of seriousness" when it comes to the diplomacy surrounding the conflict.
Mixed messages
Trump has frequently asserted that in its limited strikes in June of last year, the US "obliterated" Iran's nuclear capability.
While Iran strongly rejected that claim, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog said in a statement: "We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years."
Yet one week before this latest spate of US-Israeli attacks, Trump's lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said Iran was "a week away" from developing a nuclear bomb.
That phrase has been in use by US and Israeli officials since the turn of the century.
On Monday, however, the secretary of state's reasoning for why the US launched a war that has so far killed six Americans and more than 500 Iranians was different.
"I don’t understand what the confusion is. Let me explain it to you," Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill after briefing senior lawmakers.
"The assessment that was made was that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit [Iran], we would suffer much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision" to join the Israeli attack from the beginning, Rubio said.
"We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties," he added.
Preemptive action, however, indicates that there was an imminent threat to preempt.
"This operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it because they could hold the whole world hostage," Rubio insisted.
But Democrats emerging from that closed-door briefing disagreed.
"I have seen no evidence, intelligence, that indicates an imminent threat to America," Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
To that end, the Senate is now planning a vote on Wednesday to curb Trump's war powers. The following day, the House will vote on its own measure.
"They're using that tool to ensure that everyone has to go on record," Prescott, who is currently a senior fellow in the "American Statecraft Program" at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.
"I don't think anyone has illusions that the minority can have an impact on the president's prosecution of this war through this one vote."
Congress successfully passed a similar measure in 2020 after Trump assassinated Iran's top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, but the president vetoed it.
Unless the Senate manages a two-thirds majority in support of the resolution this week - something highly unlikely - it cannot overcome a veto.
Regime change, missiles and naval threats
Rubio laid out a number of other reasons for the administration's war.
"The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets," he said.
The issue of ballistic missiles was, at least publicly, not on Trump's radar until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid him a visit on 29 December.
The naval threat was only emphasised early on Monday morning at the Pentagon by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
"That was definitely not a focus previously," Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told MEE.
The naval threat 'was definitely not a focus previously'
- Jamal Abdi, National Iranian American Council
"I don't recall naval threats ever being on the table, and I assume this is because - now that we're in a war - there's a real concern about the Strait of Hormuz and how long Iran might be able to keep it shut down," he said.
"Any capacity for Iran to defend itself is being construed as a defence of a nuclear programme that maybe one day could get off the ground, and Israel and the United States would not have the capability to take it out, because Iran actually has capable defences."
Those defences would also be employed to protect Iran's governing structures, even as the US and Israel claim to have killed dozens of senior leaders in addition to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Too many leaders, perhaps, according to Trump, who told ABC News that his preferred picks to lead the country had also been killed.
"When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations," Trump said as he announced the beginning of the war on his TruthSocial account in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The comments were reasonably construed to mean this is a war to prompt regime change in Iran.
But by Monday, Hegseth rubbished that notion. "This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it," he told reporters.
Hegseth refused to attach a timeline to US military operations.
"President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take. Four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back. We're going to execute at his command the objectives we've set out to achieve," he said.
There's much to contend with about the rationale the administration has given the troops.
US commanders from every arm of the military have told their units that the war on Iran is “anointed by Jesus” and would bring about his return to Earth as part of the "Armageddon", resulting in scores of complaints from serving members of the military.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organisation dedicated to ensuring that all members of the US military are guaranteed religious freedom, told MEE on Tuesday that it had received more than 200 similar complaints.
Hegseth famously sports a crusader's cross tattoo across his chest.
'Poorly planned'
The US government on Monday warned all American citizens across 13 countries, plus Iran itself and the occupied West Bank and Gaza, to leave immediately via commercial flights.
That amounts to approximately one million people who are at risk in the region, as Iran retaliates with attacks on US military bases and embassies in the Gulf in particular.
Several airports remain closed.
"Will you send planes to get people out?" a reporter asked Trump on Tuesday.
"It happened all very quickly," Trump responded.
"We were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others," he added, without ever really answering the question.
In a video posted to X one day earlier, Rubio encouraged Americans to sign up for travel alerts, adding that he has surged resources to field questions and provide advice.
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee shared a lengthy post on X that pinpointed which crossings and airports Americans could use to fly out of the region. But if anything at all, it served more as a reminder of how difficult and stressful it can be to arrange for emergency travel in a war zone.
"My office is receiving panicked calls from Americans stuck in the Middle East, outraged that our government has provided zero evacuation support," Democratic Senator Andy Kim wrote on X on Tuesday.
"This Administration must immediately develop a plan to get our citizens out of harm's way, including by working with our allies and partners to secure transportation options for all Americans who wish to depart."
Late on Tuesday, Rubio announced that some 9,000 Americans have left the region since the beginning of the war and that 1,600 more still needed assistance getting out.
Democratic Senator Chris Coons on Tuesday said Hegseth and Rubio "must promptly appear before Congress and explain to the American people how they so poorly planned for the protection and evacuation of Americans from their war of choice," he wrote on X.
Both Rubio and Hegseth are expected to again brief lawmakers on the Iran war later on Tuesday.
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