Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “there is no intelligence indicating an immediate threat.” He added: “That should be the general policy.”
Trump and his aides are betting that greater American air power will bring success and cripple Iran, reducing if not eliminating the threat the regime has posed to the United States for nearly 50 years.
Underscoring the uncertainties and risks associated with the campaign, Trump and Hegseth have refused to deploy ground troops to fight Iran. And as the effects of the war spread across the region, with retaliatory Iranian strikes causing damage to Israel and Arab states and driving up oil prices, Trump said the war could last at least four to five weeks or more.
“Whatever it takes,” the president said at the Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on Monday.
When he ordered the one-day airstrike on Iran in June, Trump said it was designed to prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb and later, he said the operation “destroyed” Tehran’s nuclear program.
But this time, Trump backed a major attack on Iran with a list of ambitious targets that raised questions about the prospects for success and the rationale for launching it.
In his speech posted on the Internet on Saturday announcing the attack on Iran, Trump outlined several goals: to prevent Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon, to ensure that it cannot threaten the US or its allies with missiles, to weaken Tehran’s proxy forces, to destroy the navy and to cause the collapse of the Iranian regime.
“The administration has set the bar very high” for success, said Mark Cancian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Some of the goals can be achieved, he said.
Waves of US and Israeli airstrikes could seriously damage Iran’s missile defenses, damage its nuclear program and attack its navy, Cancian and other defense analysts said. It could weaken Iran for months or years, making the nation less of a threat to the US and its allies in the region.
Some former officers and military officers say that operations are going well in this first phase; Iran’s retaliatory strikes were largely withdrawn and there was a realistic chance of destroying Iran’s missile and military assets.
But it is unclear how the airstrikes alone would cause Iran to cut off its support for proxies in Iraq, Lebanon or Yemen, or whether targeting Iran’s leadership would cause the regime to disintegrate, as Trump has predicted, experts said.
Without armed opposition on the ground, airstrikes alone will not topple a regime that has shown it is ready to shoot thousands of protesters, Iran experts and intelligence officials say.
Trump, however, seems open to the situation that happened in Venezuela in January, where after US special forces captured the president, Nicolas Maduro, US officials formed a reasonable understanding with the vice president of Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez. Maduro and his wife have been arrested in the US and deny charges of conspiracy to use drugs.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the right thing to do,” Trump told the New York Times.
When George W. Bush was president, when his administration was about to invade Iraq, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, warned of the dangers of a coup, saying: “Once you break it, you own it.”
But Trump seems to have a different view, that removing a head of state shouldn’t carry any ownership burdens.
He promised the people of Iran over the weekend that “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” telling them to “seize control of your destiny and unleash the brightest and most glorious future within your reach. This is the time to act. Don’t let it pass.”
The Iranian government, with its Revolutionary Guard Corps as its core, is less desirable than the Venezuelan regime and will be more resistant to complying with American demands, according to Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Israel-based Institute for National Security Studies.
“Iran is not Venezuela. There is no Delcy Rodriguez,” Citrinowicz said. “Iran is not based on one important leader … no one in this regime will cooperate with the US especially after the assassination of Khamenei.”
For now, the clerical regime in Iran appears determined to dig in and absorb the blows of its most powerful enemies, with the ultimate goal of clinging to power at all costs, former officials and analysts say.
Hegseth said on Monday that the strike was not to stop the new government and dismissed the parallels with America’s tragic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is not Iraq. This is not over,” Hegseth said.
“Trump has called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right,” Hegseth told reporters. “This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, destructive, decisive operation, destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.”
But Trump kept his vision of victory vague, stopping short of saying exactly what would represent a successful campaign.
“There are a lot of good results,” Trump told NBC News on Sunday. “Number one is cutting off their heads, taking out their whole gang of killers and criminals. And there are many, many consequences. We can do a short version or a long version,” he said.
He did not elaborate.
