Trump halted attempt to launch airstrike on Iran
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s shifting accounts Friday of his abrupt decision not to launch an airstrike against Iran underscored uncertainty within his own administration, and perhaps in his own thinking, over when to use American force and how to confront a foe that he has labeled one of the world’s great menaces.
Trump and other Republicans have been split in recent years over when to use the military in the Middle East. One incident, however, has united them — President Barack Obama’s decision in 2012 to pull back from a threat to retaliate in Syria after the country’s government crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons. Republicans, including Trump, denounced that as a grave error.
Trump’s response Friday to Iran was drawing uncomfortable comparisons to that incident from some Republicans, even as the president’s restraint drew uneasy praise from some Democrats.
“I much prefer him doing the right thing in the wrong way than the wrong thing in the right way,” said Robert Malley, a former advisor on the Middle East to Obama.
“This is one of the very rare common points between President Trump and President Obama, and they come to it for different reasons in different ways and with very different world views,” Malley said. “But what they have in common is shared healthy skepticism about military entanglements in the Middle East.”
For more than a year, Trump has tried to use a combination of aggressive rhetoric and tough economic sanctions to force a change in Iran’s actions. But some of his top advisers have argued that only a change in regime would tame Tehran’s belligerence.
Trump has viewed the public differences between him and more hawkish advisers as a useful way to keep adversaries off guard and gain negotiating leverage.
But on Friday, some experts in the region warned that mixed U.S. signals had reached a dangerous level. Iran, they warned, would read Trump’s cancellation of missile strikes as a retreat, and the uncertainty could still lead to unintended conflict.
Exactly what took place on Thursday night remains somewhat uncertain. According to the account Trump gave Friday, he abruptly canceled a planned U.S. missile strike against three Iranian targets shortly before launch because he was told the raid would likely kill 150 Iranians. “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights,” Trump tweeted. “When I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General.”
“I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world,” he wrote. “Sanctions are biting & more added last night.”
Trump initially said on Twitter that he called off the strike 10 minutes before launch. Later in the day, in an interview with NBC News, he said he called off the strike about “30 minutes” before it would have been irreversible but before any planes had taken off.
“Nothing was green-lighted until the very end because things change,” he said in the interview, contradicting news reports Thursday evening sourced to administration officials.
“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 said.