Amid tensions with Iran, Trump stunned Pentagon by ordering Soleimani killing

By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.

Trump made the decision, senior officials said Saturday, despite disputes in the administration about the significance of what some officials said was a new stream of intelligence that warned of threats to U.S. embassies, consulates and military personnel in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Soleimani had just completed a tour of his forces in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and was planning an “imminent” attack that could claim hundreds of lives, those officials said.

“Days, weeks,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday, when asked how imminent any attacks could be, without offering more detail other than to say that new information about unspecified plotting was “clear and unambiguous.”

But some officials voiced private skepticism about the rationale for a strike on Soleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops over the years. According to one U.S. official, the new intelligence indicated “a normal Monday in the Middle East” — Dec. 30 — and Soleimani’s travels amounted to “business as usual.”

Editorial | After Soleimani

That official described the intelligence as thin and said that Soleimani’s attack was not imminent because of communications the U.S. had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Soleimani showing that the ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack. The ayatollah, according to the communications, had asked Soleimani to come to Tehran for further discussions at least a week before his death.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were two of the most hawkish voices arguing for a response to Iranian aggression, according to administration officials. Pence’s office helped run herd on meetings and conference calls held by officials in the run-up to the strike.

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Milley declined to comment for this article, but Milley’s spokeswoman, Col. DeDe Halfhill, said, without elaborating, that “some of the characterizations being asserted by other sources are false” and that she would not discuss conversations between Milley and the president.

The fallout from Trump’s targeted killing is now underway. On Saturday in Iraq, the U.S. military was on alert as tens of thousands of pro-Iranian fighters marched through the streets of Baghdad and calls accelerated to eject the U.S. from the country. U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said there were two rocket attacks near Iraqi bases that host American troops, but no one was injured.

In Iran, the ayatollah vowed “forceful revenge” as the country mourned the death of Soleimani.

In Palm Beach, Florida, Trump lashed back, promising to strike 52 sites across Iran — representing the number of American hostages taken by Iran in 1979 — if Iran attacked Americans or American interests. On Saturday night, Trump warned on Twitter that some sites were “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”

Administration officials insisted they did not anticipate sweeping retaliation from Iran, in part because of divisions in the Iranian leadership. But Trump’s two predecessors — Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — had rejected killing Soleimani as too provocative.

Soleimani had been in Trump’s sights since the beginning of the administration, although it was a Dec. 27 rocket attack on an Iraqi military base outside Kirkuk, which left an American civilian contractor dead, that set the killing in motion.

Milley and Esper traveled Sunday to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach resort, a day after officials presented the president with an initial list of options for how to deal with escalating violence against U.S. targets in Iraq.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. (AP)

The options included strikes on Iranian ships or missile facilities or against Iranian-backed militia groups in Iraq. The Pentagon also tacked on the choice of targeting Soleimani, mainly to make other options seem reasonable.

Trump chose strikes against militia groups. On Sunday, the Pentagon announced that airstrikes approved by the president had struck three locations in Iraq and two in Syria controlled by the group, Kataib Hezbollah.

Jonathan Hoffman, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the targets included weapons storage facilities and command posts used to attack American and partner forces. About two dozen militia fighters were killed.

“These were on remote sites,” Milley told reporters Friday in his Pentagon office. “There was no collateral damage.”

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But the Iranians viewed the strikes as out of proportion to their attack on the Iraqi base, and Iraqis — largely members of Iranian-backed militias — staged violent protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Trump, who aides said had on his mind the specter of the 2012 attacks on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, became increasingly angry as he watched television images of pro-Iranian demonstrators storming the embassy. Aides said he worried that no response would look weak after repeated threats by the U.S.

When Trump chose the option of killing Soleimani, top military officials, flabbergasted, were immediately alarmed about the prospect of Iranian retaliatory strikes on U.S. troops in the region. It is unclear if Milley or Esper pushed back on the president’s decision.