“Four different reasons in 72 hours” / Trump's conflicting explanations about the purpose of the Iran war

The exact reason for the military intervention that has already killed hundreds of Iranians and six American soldiers remains unclear, and reports suggest the Iranian threat was not imminent, the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal write. Asked in the Oval Office on Tuesday if Israel forced America's hand to attack, Trump said it may have been the other way around, because he was convinced Iran was going to strike.

Since the start of the military intervention in Iran, Trump administration officials, including the president, have offered several competing or conflicting explanations of the war's goals.

From regime change to halting Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, from helping Iranian protesters, avenging the deaths of American soldiers and halting Iran's efforts to export instability to the region, Donald Trump cited several reasons for launching the operation that has destabilized the Middle East and sent shockwaves through energy markets.

And on Monday night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio came up with another explanation: The US knew Israel was ready to attack Iran, which would have retaliated against the US. It was therefore a preemptive strike.

“We knew that if we didn't pre-emptively attack them before they launched these attacks, we would have suffered more casualties,” he told congressional reporters, a claim later echoed by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson

“Four Different Reasons for War in the Last 72 Hours”

The president has offered “four different reasons for war in the last 72 hours,” Democratic congressman Jake Auchincloss told the Financial Times. “Who could take such a supreme commander seriously?” he wondered?

Some contradictions were explicit. On Saturday, Trump called on the Iranians to overthrow the government after the US bombing.

A day later, Trump's representatives said the administration had no interest in regime change. “It's not our job to pick the next Iranian government,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told NBC.

On Sunday, Trump appeared to agree, saying he had “fulfilled” his promise to help the Iranian people. What comes next is “up to them,” he said.

He then said he had chosen “three very good options” among Iranian officials to take over the country's leadership. A day later, he told the ABC that the US and Israeli attacks were “so successful” that the candidates “all died”.

“We don't know who's running the country now. They don't know who's running,” he told CNN.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth again insisted that regime change was not a goal, although he acknowledged that the leadership in Tehran had already changed after the death of leader Ali Khameni and other top commanders.

“Administration was inconsistent and often inaccurate”

As the war widened in the Middle East, Trump announced on Sunday that the “heavy and precise” bombing would continue “without interruption throughout the week”.

On Monday, the US president said the war could last much longer. “Whatever it takes,” Trump said.

“From the beginning, we anticipated four to five weeks, but we have the capacity to go much longer,” he told CNN. “We haven't even started to really hit them,” he said.

And on Monday night, the State Department issued a more unusual recommendation, calling on Americans to leave almost the entire Middle East, a plan it apparently didn't consider at the start of the conflict.

US officials and congressmen with access to classified information, along with experts in the field, have noted that the administration's claims are incomplete, unsubstantiated or simply wrong, writes the Wall Street Journal.

And the questions will only intensify as senior administration officials brief Congress earlier this week.

“The administration has been inconsistent and often inaccurate in explaining why we are at war, the goals we are trying to achieve and how we intend to achieve them,” Michael Singh, who handled the Middle East file in the George W. Bush administration, told the Wall Street Journal.

“I don't think the administration was trying to mislead, but it creates the impression that they are building the plane in flight,” he explained.

The nuclear debate

Some of the administration's claims, including that of Iran's ability to rapidly build a nuclear bomb, have been questioned.

Steve Witkoff, the US's chief negotiator with Iran, told Fox News last month that Iran was “probably a week away” from having nuclear bomb-making material.

But the US and Israel attacked Iran's three main nuclear facilities last June, and Trump said they had been destroyed.

US congressmen and officials cited by the Wall Street Journal said Iran was nowhere near capable of building a nuclear weapon, even if it wanted to.

Officials and analysts say Iran does have uranium that could be enriched within about a week for use in making a nuclear weapon.

The problem is that Iran appears to have no enrichment facilities where centrifuges can be assembled to enrich the material to the level needed to make weapons.

And the step from obtaining highly enriched uranium to manufacturing a nuclear warhead is not exactly simple.

Little evidence for intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the US

The officials also said there was no evidence to support Trump's claim that Iran could rapidly develop a missile capable of hitting the US.

That conclusion was based in part on evidence collected following a US raid on a ship in the Indian Ocean carrying military equipment from China to Iran in December, US officials said, the Wall Street Journal writes.

U.S. special forces boarded the ship and seized military cargo destined for Iran, one of the officials said.

But there was no evidence that Tehran's efforts to launch ICBMs capable of reaching the US were about to bear fruit, according to a congressman familiar with the assessments.

Who attacks who first?

And the charge that Iran would pre-emptively attack US targets in the Middle East was based on the fact that Israel or the US would strike Iran first.

In a phone call with reporters on Saturday, a senior administration official said the president's motivation for launching an attack included the possibility of Iran launching preemptive strikes against U.S. interests in the Middle East, and that waiting any longer could risk disaster, the Wall Street Journal writes.

This scenario had been presented a few days earlier to top Republicans and Democrats in Congress, who have access to the most sensitive US intelligence information on national security matters.

But Democrats and aides familiar with the briefing said officials argued that if the scenario involved Israel striking Iran first — which officials considered highly likely — Tehran could target U.S. facilities in the region during its counterattack.

“There was no imminent threat to America that would justify exposing our troops to danger,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who attended the briefing, said Saturday.

By Sunday, administration officials had retracted their initial assertion that Iran would launch a preemptive strike on its own. On Monday, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the concern was about what Tehran would do if Israel launched an attack first.

Her explanation was echoed by Marco Rubio Monday night.

Trump: “I may have forced Israel's hand”

Donald Trump also spoke about the reasons for the attack during Tuesday's meeting at the White House with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Asked by a reporter if he forced Israel's hand to launch Saturday's attacks on Iran, the US president said it may have been the other way around.

“I may have forced the Israelis' hand. I was negotiating with these madmen (not the Iranians) and I thought they were going to attack first. They would have if we didn't do it first. I'm convinced of that. We have great negotiators, people who do this very successfully and have been doing it their whole lives. And based on the way the negotiations were going, I think they were going to attack the first. And I didn't want that to happen,” Trump said.

“But Israel was prepared, and we were prepared, and we had a very strong impact, because practically almost everything they had was destroyed,” he added.