WASHINGTON—The Trump administration, in pressing its case for war with Iran, has made a number of accusations about the regime’s threats to its neighbors, U.S. troops, and even the American homeland itself.
However, U.S. officials and lawmakers with access to classified information, along with experts who have spent their careers poring over public data and government reports, say the administration’s assertions are incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.
And questions will only intensify as top administration officials brief Congress early this week.
“The administration has been inconsistent and often inaccurate in explaining why we are at war, what we are trying to achieve and how we intend to achieve it,” said Michael Singh, who handled the Middle East portfolio in George W. Bush’s White House. “I don’t think the administration has sought to mislead, but one does get the sense that they are building the aircraft mid-flight.”
President Trump, speaking Monday at the White House, said the U.S. was running out of time to “eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime,” and added that the operation could last four to five more weeks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Capitol Hill later told reporters Tehran planned to attack the U.S. following opening strikes by Israel on Iran, requiring the U.S. to protect American forces in the region from an “imminent threat.”
Meanwhile some senior administration officials have said in recent days that the U.S. could give Iran no space to build an intercontinental ballistic missile or revive its nuclear work. They insisted that it was better to strike before Iran neared either achievement and while its economy and regime were their weakest in years.
Yet some lawmakers and U.S. officials say Iran was nowhere near capable of building a nuclear weapon, even if Tehran seeks one. They also say there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Iran could rapidly develop a missile capable of striking the U.S. And the accusation that Iran would pre-emptively attack U.S. targets in the Middle East rested on either Israel or the U.S. moving to strike Iran first.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell denied that the administration had shifted its justification for the operation. From the beginning, he said, the objectives have been to destroy Iran’s nuclear missile capability, eliminate its navy, stop its terrorist proxies from destabilizing the world, and stop the regime from deploying roadside bombs, which have killed thousands of American servicemembers.
“The mission has not changed, the intelligence has not changed, and America will prevail,” Parnell said.
But the Trump administration’s explanations for what senior officials are now openly calling a war have shifted for several weeks.
In January, Trump threatened strikes over Tehran’s deadly crackdown on antiregime 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 decadeslong aggression toward the U.S., most notably its role in killing American servicemembers in the Middle East.
Yet in the lead-up to the attack, which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other senior Iranian figures, senior administration officials moved to citing what they deemed troubling intelligence as the core of their case for military action.
They argued that Iran was developing intercontinental missiles capable of reaching American shores, with officials noting that the U.S. obtained new information in recent months indicating Tehran’s intention to build the weapon.
That determination was based partly on evidence gathered from a U.S. raid on a ship in the Indian Ocean ferrying military-related cargo from China to Iran in December, U.S. officials said. U.S. special-operations forces boarded it and confiscated military-related cargo headed to Iran, one of the officials said.
But no evidence was found that Tehran’s effort to field intercontinental missiles able to reach the U.S. was close to fruition, according to a lawmaker familiar with the assessments. Recent U.S. intelligence assessments had concluded that Iran couldn’t develop dozens of missiles for at least a decade.
Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a group that is skeptical of U.S. military intervention abroad, said there remains a “huge gap” between Iran’s current capabilities and its ability to field missiles that can reach the U.S.
Others argue that Iran has the technology and know-how to build the missiles, and that the only limiting factor is Iran’s decision to make it. “There are no showstoppers in front of them,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on global security at Middlebury College. Still, Lewis said that even if Tehran wanted to pursue building the weapons, it would likely take two to three years at least to build a single missile based on the history of how other nations developed similar missiles.
Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, told reporters Monday that the real problem was Iran’s short-range missiles, which could help the country deter others from stopping it from pursuing a nuclear weapon.
“Right now our focus is on the destruction of their ballistic missile launchers, their ballistic missile stockpiles and their ballistic missile manufacturing capability,” he said.
Trump’s team said a more immediate threat also prompted action.
On a call with reporters Saturday, a senior administration official said that the president’s motivation to strike included the possibility of Iran launching attacks pre-emptively against U.S. assets in the Middle East, and that further waiting could risk disaster. That scenario had been briefed days earlier to the Gang of Eight—the top Republicans and Democrats in Congress privy to 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 believed was very likely—Tehran could target U.S. installations in the region during its counterstrike.
“There was no imminent threat to America that would justify putting our troops in harm’s way,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Gang of Eight member who attended the briefing, said in an interview Saturday.
Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.), who sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and sees intelligence products, said Saturday that he hadn’t heard from administration officials about any imminent attack on U.S. territory. “There has been nothing raised to us 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 attack on its own. On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the concern was what Tehran would do if Israel launched an assault first.
“The United States understood that Israel was going to strike Iran, and when they did, Iran would attack the United States,” she said, further noting Iran’s capability to hit U.S. allies in Europe. “President Trump was not going to sit back and watch the evil Iranian regime prepare to attack Americans. If he had, and Americans were killed, the media would be criticizing him for his carelessness and unwillingness to attack.”
On Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Trump officials also offered public assertions that differed from the consensus among other countries and independent experts, and didn’t share intelligence with lawmakers to bolster their claims.
Steve Witkoff, the U.S.’s chief negotiator with Iran, told Fox News last month that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” But the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s three main nuclear sites last June and Trump said that they had been obliterated. Iran’s atomic program hasn’t advanced significantly since then, as the Journal has reported.
Officials and analysts note that Iran does have uranium that could be enriched around the one-week time frame to make it usable for a nuclear weapon. The issue is Iran appears to have no enrichment facility where cascades of centrifuges are assembled to enrich the material to weapons grade. Iran also would have to get access to the stockpile, which would very possibly be tracked. And even if Iran did get weapons-grade uranium, it would still have to assemble scientists, produce uranium material and build it inside a nuclear device—all without being 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 that obliterated their nuclear facilities.”
Trump’s ultimate aim in Iran is still unclear. He has offered several competing narratives since the operation began, ranging from regime change to eliminating Iran’s threats to the U.S. to cutting a deal with new leadership in Tehran.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pointed to Iran’s decadeslong “savage, one-sided war against America” and noted that Trump had given Iran multiple opportunities to negotiate away its nuclear work and missile program.
The U.S. and Israeli operation wasn’t aimed at regime change, but the Iranian regime “sure did change,” Hegseth said, urging the Iranian people to “take advantage of this incredible opportunity.”
Classified intelligence assessments produced by the Central Intelligence Agency in recent weeks determined that Khamenei’s demise could lead to hard-liners from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or another faction in the country taking power, according to people familiar with the matter.
The classified analysis considered multiple scenarios and wasn’t an intelligence product of high confidence, but it said there were substantial obstacles for dissidents or resistance figures to seize control in Tehran given the level of oppression in the country, which could make it difficult for a genuine antiregime movement to gain traction, those people said.
Trump, however, is still encouraging Iranians to overthrow the regime with U.S. support.
“I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment, to be brave, be bold, be heroic, and take back your country,” he said. “America is with you.”