Trump’s case for war with Iran is under increasing scrutiny

However, US officials and lawmakers with access to classified information, as well as experts who have spent their careers focusing on public data and government reports, say the administration’s claims are incomplete, unsubstantiated or completely false.

And the questions will intensify as top administration officials brief Congress earlier this week.

“The administration has been inconsistent and often inaccurate in explaining why we are at war, what we are trying to accomplish and how we intend to accomplish it,” said Michael Singh, who handled the Middle East portfolio in George W. Bush’s White House. “I don’t think the administration tried to mislead, but it looks like they’re building the plane in mid-flight.”

President Trump, Speaking at the White House on MondaySaid the US was running out of time to “eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime”, and said the operation could last four to five weeks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later told reporters on Capitol Hill that Tehran planned to attack the US after Israel’s initial attacks on Iran, which would require the US to protect US forces in the region from “imminent danger”.

Meanwhile, some senior administration officials have said in recent days that the US cannot give Iran any room to build intercontinental ballistic missiles or revive its nuclear work. He stressed that it would be better to attack Iran before it got close to any achievements and while its economy and governance were at their weakest in years.

Yet some lawmakers and US officials say Iran is nowhere near capable of producing a nuclear weapon, even if Tehran wanted to. They also say there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Iran could rapidly develop missiles capable of attacking the US and that allegations that Iran would preemptively attack US targets in the Middle East are based on the assumption that either Israel or the US is moving to attack Iran first.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, denied that the administration had changed its justification for the operation. The objective from the beginning, he said, was to destroy Iran’s nuclear missile capability, destroy its navy, prevent its terrorist proxies from destabilizing the world and prevent the regime from deploying the roadside bombs that have killed thousands of American soldiers.

“The mission has not changed, the intelligence has not changed, and America will win,” Parnell said.

But in the Trump administration’s clarification, senior officials are now openly calling for war. moved for several weeks.

In January, Trump threatened attacks over Tehran’s deadly crackdown on anti-regime protesters, but never ordered them. He then focused on dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs through negotiations. Trump later pointed to Iran’s decades-long aggression toward the US, particularly its role in the killing of US troops in the Middle East.

Yet in the lead-up to the attack, which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other senior Iranians, senior administration officials cited troubling intelligence at the core of their case for military action.

He argued that Iran is developing intercontinental missiles capable of reaching US shores, with officials saying the US has received new information in recent months that indicates Tehran’s intention to build weapons.

This determination was based in part on evidence collected from the U.S. Raid on a ship in the Indian Ocean US officials said the shipment of military-related goods from China to Iran in December. One of the officials said US special operations forces boarded it and seized military-related cargo headed for Iran.

But according to a lawmaker familiar with the assessment, there was no evidence that Tehran’s effort to deploy intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the US was close to succeeding. Recent US intelligence assessments concluded that Iran could not develop dozens of missiles for at least a decade.

Rosemary Kelenic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a group that is skeptical of US military intervention abroad, said a “huge gap” remains between Iran’s current capabilities and its ability to deploy missiles that can reach the US.

Others argue that Iran has the technology and know-how to build a missile, and the only limiting factor is Iran’s decision to build one. “He’s not a showstopper,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on global security at Middlebury College. Still, Lewis said that even if Tehran wanted to produce the weapon, it would take at least two to three years to produce a single missile, based on the history of other countries developing similar missiles.

Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, told reporters on Monday that the real problem is Iran’s short-range missiles, which could help the country deter others from developing nuclear weapons.

“Our focus right now is on destroying their ballistic missile launchers, their ballistic missile stockpiles and their ballistic missile manufacturing capabilities,” he said.

Trump’s team said a more immediate threat also prompted action.

Speaking to reporters Saturday, a senior administration official said the president’s motivation for the attack included the possibility of Iran launching a pre-emptive strike against U.S. assets in the Middle East, and that waiting any further could risk disaster. That scenario had been briefed days earlier to the Gang of Eight — the top Republicans and Democrats in Congress who hold the most sensitive U.S. intelligence about national-security matters.

But Democratic lawmakers and aides familiar with the briefing said officials made the case that if Israel attacked Iran first — which officials believe is very likely — Tehran could target U.S. installations in the region during its retaliatory strike.

“There was no imminent threat to the United States that would justify putting our troops in harm’s way,” Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Gang of Eight who attended the briefing, said in an interview on Saturday.

Senator Andy Kim (D., NJ), who sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and oversees intelligence products, said Saturday that he has not heard from administration officials about any imminent attacks on US territory. “We have been told nothing about increasing homeland resources to counter these types of threats.”

By Sunday, administration officials had walked back their initial claim that Iran would launch a pre-emptive strike on its own. On Monday, White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt said the concern was what Tehran would do if Israel attacked first.

“The United States understood that Israel was going to attack Iran, and when they did, Iran would attack the United States,” he said, referring to Iran’s ability to attack US allies in Europe. “President Trump was not going to sit back and watch the rogue Iranian regime prepare to attack Americans. If he did that and Americans were killed, the media would be criticizing him for his negligence and unwillingness to attack.”

On Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump officials also made public claims that differed from the consensus among other countries and independent experts, and did not share intelligence with lawmakers to bolster their claims.

Steve Witkoff, the US’s chief negotiator with Iran, told Fox News last month that Iran was “probably a week away from getting the materials to make an industrial-grade bomb.” But the US and Israel attacked Iran’s three main nuclear sites last June and Trump said they had been destroyed. Iran’s nuclear program Has not progressed significantly Since then, as reported by the Journal.

Officials and analysts say Iran has uranium that can be enriched to make it usable for a nuclear weapon in around a week’s time. The issue is that Iran appears to have no enrichment facility where a cascade of centrifuges is assembled to enrich the material to weapons grade. Iran would also have to gain access to stockpiles, which could potentially be tracked. And even if Iran does find weapons-grade uranium, it will still have to gather scientists, produce the uranium material, and build it inside a nuclear device — without getting caught doing so.

But, Leavitt said, “the United States assessed that the Iranian regime was trying to rebuild what was destroyed in the successful Operation Midnight Hammer strikes, which destroyed their nuclear facilities.”

Trump’s ultimate objective in Iran is still unclear. he has offered multiple competing narratives Since the operation started, from the change of power From eliminating Iran’s threats to America to striking a deal with the new leadership in Tehran.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Pointed to Iran’s decades-long “brutal, unilateral war against the US”ND said Trump had given Iran several opportunities to negotiate over its nuclear work and missile program.

Hegseth urged the Iranian people to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity”, saying the US and Israeli operation was not aimed at regime change, but “certainly changed” the Iranian regime.

According to people familiar with the matter, classified intelligence assessments conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in recent weeks have suggested that Khamenei’s demise could lead to radicals from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or another faction in the country taking power.

The classified analysis considered multiple scenarios and was not a high-confidence intelligence product, but it said there were substantial obstacles for dissidents or resistance figures to gain control in Tehran, given the level of oppression in the country, which could make it difficult for a genuine anti-regime movement to take hold, those people said.

However, Trump is still encouraging Iranians to overthrow the regime with US support.

He said, “I call on all Iranian patriots yearning for freedom to take advantage of this moment, to be brave, to be fearless, to be heroic and to take back their country.” “America is with you.”