White House offers shifting rationales for war with Iran

As an expanding Middle East war entered its fourth day, the Trump administration gave shifting rationales for its decision to attack Iran, even as U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports said they saw no sign the country had posed an imminent threat to the United States.

President Donald Trump and his top national security aides, defending a conflict that has tepid public backing and is incurring escalating risks, emphasized Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles rather than its nuclear program as the principal threat. But they provided different descriptions of the danger.

At his first public event since the attack began, Trump on Monday never mentioned a key part of his original rationale for the war: deposing Iran’s theocratic regime.

Instead, he emphasized that Iran would “soon” have missiles that could hit targets inside the United States.

What Trump had outlined over the weekend as an effort to devastate Tehran’s rulers so that the Iranian people could take over was, by Monday, “not a so-called regime change war,” in the words of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon that the Islamic Republic was building sophisticated missiles and other conventional weapons to shield its plans for a nuclear bomb. “Iran had a conventional gun to our head as they tried to lie their way to a nuclear bomb,” he said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a third line of reasoning. The United States, he said, knew Israel was going to strike Iran, which would lead to counterattacks against U.S. forces and potential casualties, and decided to strike first to minimize the risk.

Iran’s voluminous missile arsenal, which was thinned by U.S.-Israeli strikes last June but still considered dangerous, consists mostly of short-range missiles threatening U.S. bases and allies in the Middle East. Over the last two years, Iran has fired those missiles in response to attacks on its territory or interests, but not preemptively.

As for an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of directly reaching the United States, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reported last year that Iran could have that weapon by 2035 “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”

Meanwhile, more than three days into the conflict and after more than a thousand airstrikes, U.S. and Israeli weapons so far have largely left Iran’s main nuclear installations untouched, suggesting those sites — significantly damaged last June — are not currently seen as a priority threat.

The White House’s shifting public goals for the war, and questions about the intelligence behind them, have contributed to a lack of clarity about when Trump might declare an end to the largest military operation since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

As the war widened across the Middle East, Trump said operations against Iran could go on for four to five weeks, or longer. In an interview with the New York Post, the president said he would not rule out sending in U.S. ground troops, but added that they are “probably” not needed.

Republican lawmakers have largely backed Trump’s decision to strike Iran, citing its long record of terrorism against the United States and its allies, and its nuclear ambitions.

But Rubio’s decision to pin the justification for the attack on Israel angered prominent MAGA commentators and conservative pundits, who said an operation of this magnitude should be done squarely in the interests of the United States.

“My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” said Trump advocate and podcast host Megyn Kelly, referring to the first four acknowledged U.S. deaths in the war, a toll that later rose to six. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel.”

In a social media post Monday night, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi piled on. “Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: U.S. has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat,’” he wrote.

This week, the House and Senate are poised to vote on measures that would attempt to halt further military attacks in Iran without lawmakers’ approval, as Democrats frame the conflict as an “illegal war” launched without a clear rationale or an authorization from Congress.

A Washington Post flash poll found that 52% of Americans oppose the strikes “strongly” or “somewhat,” while 39% support them.

Even as the administration’s public case for war shifted, several U.S. officials with access to classified intelligence assessments said there was no information before the strikes began indicating Iran has made sudden, worrisome progress in its missile or nuclear programs.

“There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel,” Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters Monday.

Others said Iran’s weakness, amid severe economic problems and protests that challenged the regime, provided an opportunity to strike.

A former U.S. intelligence official said American spy agencies were concerned by the speed with which Iran reconstituted its missile program after the 12-day war in June. “If you wait a year from now, maybe the regime will have stabilized, the missile program will be more populated and federated,” said the former official, who spoke before the strikes began and requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject.

With Trump a potentially lame duck president in a year’s time, “Right now is the sweet spot,” he said.

Multiple legal experts argued that none of the administration’s public explanations for the attacks appeared to constitute a legitimate rationale to enter into such a major conflict, especially without authorization from Congress.

“Having a weapons capacity is not the same thing as presenting an imminent threat of an armed attack,” said Tess Bridgeman, a former senior lawyer on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

The first days of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes appeared focused on decapitating Iran’s leadership and blunting its ability to retaliate by destroying missile infrastructure and disrupting its military command network.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Monday that the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has seen no “major military activity targeting the nuclear facilities” in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli attacks began early Saturday. That assessment, he said, is based on information from Iran as well as multiple satellite images, including those provided “by the U.S. and others.”

Grossi’s assessment came as Tehran charged there was an attack on its Natanz enrichment facility and as Israel warned civilians to evacuate areas around Isfahan, a major center of Iran’s nuclear program.

Satellite imagery of Natanz captured Monday showed damage to three buildings on the site, damage that Grossi indicated was fairly minor. Vehicle and personnel entrances to underground portions of the facility where centrifuges are kept appear to have been hit, according to the imagery.

The United States and Israel have long accused Iran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon under the cover of enriching uranium for civilian purposes. Last year’s strikes targeting Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities and other sites significantly delayed the program, U.S., Israeli, and IAEA officials said. Trump and Hegseth said Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been “obliterated.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency in a report produced before those strikes assessed that since 2019, in the wake of Trump leaving a nuclear deal with Iran that limited its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic had boosted uranium enrichment and expanded its stockpiles to the point that the time required to produce sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a first nuclear device had fallen to “probably less than one week.”

The actual time to produce a weapon ranged from two to four months, the agency estimated, according to people familiar with the assessments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The June strikes targeted Iran’s main enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordow. But the Iranians had been manufacturing centrifuge cascades long before the strikes and likely were storing them at other locations, the people said. “So their ability to do a breakout may or may not have been dependent at all” on the sites that were bombed, one person said.

Post-strike, the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies determined that the time Iran now needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium to build a warhead in extremis — without rebuilding the damaged sites — had lengthened to between four and eight months, people familiar with the matter said.

Uncertainties about Iran’s nuclear program are heightened by the fact that IAEA inspectors left the country last July and haven’t returned.

“The return of the IAEA inspectors will be further delayed as a result of the renewed conflict, and without effective IAEA monitoring, the whereabouts and security of Iran’s highly enriched uranium will now become even more uncertain,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association think tank.

In the meantime, Kimball said, “There hasn’t been any sign that Iran is rebuilding anything.”