U.S. officials struggle to defend air strike
Top Trump administration officials struggled on Sunday to defend an air strike that killed a senior Iranian general, acknowledging that they could not confirm President Donald Trump’s Friday assertion that Iranians planned to attack four U.S. embassies.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, Defence Secretary Mark Esper said he “didn’t see” evidence of an Iranian plan to attack four U.S. embassies. But he said he “share(s) the president’s view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country.”
On Friday, Trump said that senior Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed by a U.S. drone strike, had been planning attacks on four U.S. embassies, a claim made to justify the decision.
That assertion was at odds with intelligence assessments from senior officials in Trump’s administration. On Friday, a senior administration official and a senior defence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, told The Washington Post they were only aware of vague intelligence about a plot against the embassy in Baghdad and that the information did not suggest a fully formed plot. Neither official said there were threats against multiple embassies.
On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Esper defended the strike on Soleimani, saying it “disrupted attacks” and “reset terms with Iran.”
White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien also defended the strike, saying on ABC’s This Week that the Iranian regime is “having a very bad week” and that the United States would continue a “maximum pressure campaign” against the regime.
He also said the president has shown “incredible restraint” in the face of regular provocation from Iran and has also been “modest in his dealings” with other countries.
But O’Brien did not confirm Trump’s claim that the White House had received intelligence that Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, was planning “imminent” attacks against four U.S. embassies.
Even with America’s “exquisite intelligence” it is difficult “to know exactly what the targets are,” O’Brien said. He added that it was fair to anticipate a future Iranian attack “would have hit embassies in at least four countries.”
Top Democrats have also pushed back on Esper’s claim that the Gang of Eight — the bipartisan Congressional group that traditionally is read in on classified intelligence and military maters — was given information on the threat to attack the embassy in Baghdad. Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the Gang of Eight, contradicted Esper’s assertion on Face the Nation about the briefing to Congress, saying it lacked “specificity” about a potential embassy threat.