Pentagon ‘was asked for military options to strike Iran’

The White House's national security team asked the Pentagon to provide it with options for a military strike against Iran, it emerged on Sunday.

The request was prompted by an incident last September when a group of Iraqi militants aligned with Tehran fired three mortars into a diplomatic area in Baghdad that houses the US Embassy, the Wall Street Journal reported.

US military chiefs complied with the request, but it is not known whether the options for an Iran strike were provided to President Donald Trump, or if he knew about it.

Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said it “coordinates policy and provides the president with options to anticipate and respond to a variety of threats.”

“We continue to review the status of our personnel following attempted attacks on our embassy in Baghdad and our Basra consulate, and we will consider a full range of options to preserve their safety and our interests,” he told the newspaper.

The request to the Pentagon for military options is a further indication of a tough new US policy on Iran since the appointments in April 2018 of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser.

“It definitely rattled people,” one former senior US administration official told the newspaper. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

Bolton's role as national security adviser is to supply diplomatic, military and economic advice to President Trump. Before his appointment, he campaigned for regime change in Iran, and frequently urged the US to attack Tehran.

In March 2015, before the signing of the agreement to curb Iran's nuclear program, Bolton wrote a newspaper article titled “To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran.”