Trump swayed by skeptics as deadline neared
CANCELED IRAN ATTACK
WASHINGTON — He heard from his generals and his diplomats. Lawmakers weighed in and so did his advisers. But among the voices that rang powerfully for President Donald Trump was that of one of his favorite
Fox News hosts: Tucker Carlson.
While national security advisers were urging a military strike against
Iran, Carlson in recent days had told Trump that responding to Tehran’s provocations with force was crazy. The hawks did not have the president’s best interests at heart, he said. And if Trump got into a war with Iran, he could kiss his chances of reelection goodbye.
However much weight that advice may or may not have had, the sentiments certainly
reinforced the doubts that Trump himself harbored as he navigated his way through one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of his presidency. By his own account, the president called off the “cocked & loaded” strike Thursday night with only 10 minutes to spare to avoid the estimated deaths of as many as 150 people.
The concerns that Trump heard from Carlson reflected that part of the presidential id that has always hesitated at pulling the trigger. Belligerent and confrontational as he is in his public persona, Trump has at times pulled back from the use of force, convinced that America has wasted too many lives and too much money in pointless Middle East wars and wary of repeating what he considers the mistakes of his predecessors.
As Carlson and other skeptics have argued, a strike against Iran could easily spiral into a fullfledged war without an easy victory. That, Trump was told, was everything he ran against.
The full story of how Trump set in motion an attack on another country and then canceled it remained to some extent shrouded in mystery even to some of those involved, according to interviews with administration officials, military officers and lawmakers, many of whom asked not to be named. On the day after the aborted strike, multiple, seemingly conflicting accounts emerged and the White House made no effort to reconcile them, choosing to stay silent about the deliberations. A spokeswoman for Fox News declined to comment.
Trump had been resisting a military response to repeated provocations by Iran for weeks by the time he woke up Thursday morning to discover that a U.S. spy plane had been shot down. Now led by John Bolton, his hawkish national security adviser, the president was faced with the choice of how to respond.
On Thursday morning, only hours after the drone was shot down, Bolton met for breakfast at the White House at 7 a.m. with Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary who had announced his resignation just three days earlier, as well as with Mark Esper, the Army secretary set to replace Shanahan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The group discussed the drone episode and deliberated a possible military response to recommend to the president. At 11 a.m., the same group along with other national security officials met with Trump to brief him on options for a strike on Iran. According to one administration official, the potential casualties of such an attack were discussed at that meeting.
But as usual, Trump did not rely exclusively on his official team. Among the outsiders he talked with in the morning was Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close ally. Graham urged that he consider a military response to the drone’s shooting down.
At 3 p.m., Trump hosted congressional leaders in the Situation Room to brief them about the episode and outline the alternative responses. At least some of those in the room left assuming that he was likely to order a strike.
Trump was given a list of at least a dozen strike options generated this month after there were attacks on tankers in the region. The list was then narrowed down to at least two alternatives. Among the targets would be facilities like radar and missile batteries.
Administration officials said Friday that the president’s national security team was unanimous in favoring a response and all agreed with the final option recommended to Trump. But several military officials said Dunford cautioned about the possible repercussions of a strike, warning that it could endanger U.S. forces and allies in the region. A 6 p.m. meeting in Shanahan’s office at the Pentagon including Dunford was described as particularly tense.
As of 7 p.m., senior U.S. officials were told the strike was on and would be carried out between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., or just before dawn in Iran. Within an hour, it was called off.
On Twitter and in an interview with NBC News, Trump attributed his change of heart to a desire to avoid casualties.
“I want to know something before you go,” he said he asked his generals. “How many people would be killed, in this case Iranians?”
The generals, he said, replied that about 150 people would die.
“I thought about it for a second, and I said, you know what, they shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it, and here we are sitting with 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead,” Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd. “And I didn’t like it, I didn’t think, I didn’t think it was proportionate.”
But an administration official informed about the discussions privately disputed that account. The 150-dead casualty estimate came not from a general but from a lawyer, according to the official. The estimate was developed by Pentagon lawyers drafting worst-case scenarios that, the official said, did not account for whether the strike was carried out during daytime, when more people might be present at the targets, or in the dark hours before sunrise, as the military planned.
That estimate was passed to the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, without being cleared with Shanahan or Dunford. It was then conveyed to the president by the White House lawyers, at which point Trump changed his mind and called off the strike.
But the lawyers’ involvement was seen by some of Trump’s aides as an attempt to circumvent Bolton to influence the president. In effect, whether intended to or not, the casualty estimate played to the concerns that Trump had shared with Carlson and other skeptics of military action in the Middle East.
By this point, time was running out. Graham, who had pushed for a strike, was on an airplane heading to the West Coast and out of touch. Trump scrubbed the mission.
The decision made, the military ordered ships and planes in the region to stand down. At the White House, Trump turned on his television to watch the opening of Carlson’s 8 p.m. show, where he heard what surely must have sounded like vindication. On screen, Carlson declared that “foreign wars have ended in dismal failure for the United States.”
While no decision had been announced yet, Carlson praised Trump for resisting military intervention in Iran. “The same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire 16 years ago are demanding a new war, this one with Iran,” he said. “The president, to his great credit, appears to be skeptical of this — very skeptical.”