White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran — which subsequently ignited a conflict that has sparked chaos across the Middle East — was grounded in what she called a “feeling based on fact” that Iran would imminently attack the United States and its allies.
“The president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back and stood by and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration,” she said at a White House briefing when The Independent pressed her on the shifting explanations for the war offered by top administration officials since the weekend.
“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” Leavitt added.
Leavitt, briefing reporters for the first time since the beginning of the joint American-Israeli bombing campaign five days ago, comes after days of incongruous messaging and contradictory explanations from top Trump administration officials regarding Trump’s reasons for taking the U.S. into war in the Middle East.
In the days after Trump announced the launch of Operation Epic Fury in an early-morning social media post Saturday, his administration’s justifications for such a massive and costly military campaign have shifted rapidly from day to day and even from hour to hour.
Initially, the strikes were framed as necessary to prevent Iranian efforts to rebuild a nuclear weapons program Trump has claimed to have “obliterated” with bunker-busting munitions last June.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Monday that the decision to attack was made to preemptively degrade Tehran’s ability to retaliate against American bases after an attack by Israel.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action,” Rubio told reporters after briefing members of Congress Tuesday. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
But Trump himself contradicted that claim during a media availability with reporters Tuesday after he was asked if Israel had “forced his hand” with their own attack plans.
“Based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn’t want that to happen,” Trump said. “So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready.”
He also told reporters it was his “opinion that they were going to attack first.”
“They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first, I felt strongly about that,” he said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday appeared to offer yet another explanation during an early-morning briefing at the Pentagon when he told reporters that the leader of an Iranian unit believed to have been behind an effort to pay for an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Trump had been “hunted down and killed.”
“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. and Israel “will control Iran and will control it soon” by dominating Iran’s “airspace and waterways” and said the U.S. was working to “annihilate” Tehran’s navy, including a ship in the Indian Ocean which was sunk by an American submarine’s torpedo.
He claimed the sunk ship had been named for the late Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qassem Soleimani and hailed the submarine’s kill as the first torpedo sinking of a surface ship since the end of the Second World War, even though Pakistani and British submarines successfully sank Indian and Argentinian ships in 1971 and 1982, respectively.
While administration officials have sought to distinguish the aerial bombing campaign from prior “regime change” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the initial strikes had the effect of decapitating Iran’s government by killing longtime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials, while Trump’s initial announcement of the campaign urged the Iranian people to rise up against their own government.
Trump has acknowledged that Khamenei’s replacement could be “as bad” as the late Ayatollah, calling that possible outcome a “worst case” scenario.
“You go through this and then in five years you realize you’ve put someone in who is no better. So, we’d like to see somebody in there who’s going to bring it back for the people,” he told reporters Tuesday.
Yet even as the White House has made no secret of its desire to destabilize and topple the Islamic Republic regime that has ruled over Iran since 1979, the administration has steadfastly refused to put forward any plan for how it would see a friendlier government take power in Tehran.
Leavitt has also dismissed questions about whether the Trump administration would accept an outcome of the conflict that includes a still-standing Islamic Republic.
“That’s a hypothetical question that I’m not going to engage in,” she told reporters Wednesday.
The regime’s often-violent efforts to repress dissent have also made it difficult to identify any opposition figure in the country who could be a credible alternative to the current leadership.
Trump has been cool at best towards the most prominent Iranian opposition leader in the U.S., the son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi.
“Some people like him, and we haven’t been thinking too much about that,” Trump said Tuesday when asked about Pahlavi, who has spent much of the last half-century living in suburban Maryland.
“It would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe would be more appropriate,” he said.
