WASHINGTON — President Trump took the United States to war without a vote of support from Congress, but lawmakers are increasingly questioning when, how and at what cost the war with Iran will come to an end.
Three weeks into the conflict, the toll is becoming apparent. At least 13 U.S. military personnel have died and more than 230 have been wounded. A $200-billion request from the Pentagon for war funds is pending from the White House. Allies are under attack, oil prices are skyrocketing, and thousands more U.S. troops are deploying to the Middle East with no endgame in sight.
“The real question is: What ultimately are we trying to accomplish?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told the Associated Press.
“I generally support anything that takes out the mullahs,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there has to be a kind of strategic articulation of the strategy, what our objectives are.”
Trump said late Friday that he was considering “winding down” the military operations even as he outlined new objectives and goals and despite the continued buildup of forces in the region.
Congress stands still
The president’s decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is testing the resolve of Congress, which is controlled by his party. Republicans have largely stood by the commander in chief, but will soon be faced with more consequential wartime choices.
Under the War Powers Act, the president can conduct military operations for 60 days without approval from Congress. So far, Republicans have easily voted down several resolutions from Democrats designed to halt the war.
But the administration will need to show a more comprehensive strategy ahead or risk blowback from Congress, lawmakers said, especially as they are being asked to approve billions in new spending.
Trump’s casual comment that the war will end “when I … feel it in my bones” has drawn alarm.
“When he feels it in his bones? That’s crazy,” said Virginia Sen. Mark R. Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
House speaker says mission is ‘all but done’
The president’s party appears unlikely to directly challenge him, even as the conflict drags on. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the military operation will be over quickly.
“I do think the original mission is virtually accomplished now,” Johnson told the AP and others at the Capitol this week.
“We were trying to take out the ballistic missiles, and their means of production, and neuter the navy, and those objectives have been met,” he said.
Johnson acknowledged that Iran’s ability to threaten ships in the Strait of Hormuz is “dragging it out a little bit,” especially as U.S. allies have largely rebuffed the president’s request for help.
“As soon as we bring some calm to the situation, I think it’s all but done,” Johnson said.
But the administration’s stated goals — of ending Iran’s ability to obtain a nuclear weapon and degrading its ballistic missile supplies, among others — have perplexed lawmakers as shifting and elusive.
″Regime change? Not likely. Get rid of the enriched uranium? Not without boots on the ground,” Warner said.
“If I’m advising the president, I would have said: Before you take on a war of choice, make the case clear to the American people what our goals are,” he said.
The power of the purse
The Pentagon has told the White House that it is seeking an additional $200 billion for the war effort, an extraordinary amount that is unlikely to win support. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York called the amount “preposterous.”
The Defense Department’s approved appropriations from Congress this year are more than $800 billion, and Trump’s tax breaks bill gave the Pentagon an additional $150 billion over the next several years for various upgrades and projects.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said the country has other priorities.
“How about not taking away funding for Medicaid, which will impact millions of people? How about making sure SNAP is funded?” she said, referring to the healthcare and food assistance programs that were cut as part of last year’s Republican tax reductions.
“These are things that we should be doing for the American people,” she said.
Many lawmakers have recalled the decision by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to come to Congress to seek an authorization for the use of military force — a vote to support his proposed military actions in Afghanistan and later Iraq.
Tillis said Trump has latitude under the War Powers Act to conduct the military campaign, but that will soon shift.
“When you get into the 45-day mark, you’ve got to start articulating one of two things — an authorization for the use of military force to sustain it beyond that or a very clear path on exit,” he said.
“Those are really the options the administration needs to be thinking about.”
WASHINGTON — The Defense Department last week outlined a concise set of military objectives in President Trump’s war against Iran, claiming its ultimate goal is to dismantle Tehran’s ability to project power beyond its borders. Yet it may be targets the Pentagon has largely left unacknowledged that offer the clearest insight yet into Trump’s true intentions.
U.S. military strikes have focused on Iran’s ballistic missile, drone and nuclear programs, as well as its naval assets, according to U.S. Central Command. But strikes have also increasingly targeted Iran’s internal security forces, used by the Islamic Republic to suppress public dissent, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project shared with The Times.
The strikes have targeted at least 123 headquarters, barracks and local bases operated by Iran’s paramilitary organizations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia. Regional police forces, primarily in the capital region around Tehran and in western Iran, near areas dominated by Kurdish groups hostile to the Iranian government, have also been targeted.
Some of those groups are being armed and supported by the U.S. intelligence community, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.
Nicholas Carl, with the Critical Threats Project, said the pattern indicates the campaign is already underway to set the conditions for a revolution.
“As we are going after these repressive institutions, we are degrading the ability of the regime to monitor its population, to repress its population,” Carl said. “And so it looks as though the strike campaign may be organized around trying to erode the ability of the regime to repress in those areas.”
Analysts said that strikes against internal forces could be greater than they have measured thus far, noting the difficulty of tracking targets in the war based on publicly available data due to an internet blackout strictly enforced by the Iranian government.
An explosion erupts after strikes near Azadi Tower close to Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran on Saturday.
(Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images)
The quieter side of the U.S. campaign suggests a political strategy by the Trump administration that goes beyond simply containing the Iranian government, and may instead aim to lay the groundwork for its overthrow.
Trump and his top aides have been inconsistent in their messaging on their goals for the war, vacillating between calls for regime change and far shorter ambitions, such as an Islamic Republic that remains in power under leadership more acquiescent to the United States.
Before the war began, Trump was presented with an intelligence assessment that large-scale military action was unlikely to topple the Iranian government, two sources familiar with the assessment said. The assessment led analysts at the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon all to advise the White House against proceeding with the operation. The intelligence analysis was first reported by the Washington Post.
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Greasing the wheels for domestic unrest, for insurgency or revolution could serve other strategic purposes for the Trump administration beyond effecting regime change, adding new sources of pressure on an Islamic Republic that, if still intact by war’s end, would face renewed internal pressures at a moment of historic weakness.
Rob Malley, lead negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and special U.S. envoy for Iran under President Biden, said that a sustained U.S. campaign that cripples Iran’s ability to maintain domestic control could mean “the regime collapses, in the sense that it can no longer, genuinely and effectively, govern the entirety of the country.”
“Right now, what Trump is saying suggests an extremely ambitious, extremely long-term, extremely perilous campaign that will only end with Iran’s surrender, and it’s very hard to see Iran surrendering,” Malley said. But the campaign may already be working. “Their communications have certainly been penetrated — they cannot meet without being targeted by Israel or the United States,” he added.
A woman holds a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a protest Saturday by medical professionals outside Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which was damaged in an airstrike earlier this week.
(Majid Saeedi / Getty Images)
“Either the regime stays in place weakened, bloodied, finding it harder to govern a more fragmented, chaotic country,” Malley continued, “or the regime no longer can govern.”
An Israeli official did not deny that internal security forces were being targeted, although the official said that Israel was focused on assassinating Iran’s political and security leadership — “tiers one, two and three,” the official said. The vast majority of the strikes against internal security services thus far have been conducted by the United States.
“Our goal is to weaken the ayatollah regime, to a point where the Iranian people can choose their fate,” the official told The Times. “It’s still not at the point where they can do that, but there is work still to be done.”
By all accounts, the campaign against Iran’s military assets has achieved success. Iranian ballistic missile attacks against Israel and U.S. forces and allies in the region have decreased by 90% after just a week of combat, Defense officials said. Drone strikes have decreased by 83%. Over 30 Iranian vessels, including those used as launching pads for drones and aircraft, have been destroyed — a significant number for Iran’s aged and ill-funded naval fleet.
Trump could simply declare victory based on these results alone, said Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran in 2020.
“They will get weaker as they use up resources and we bomb more and more relevant sites. Already air traffic is starting up again,” Abrams said, noting that commercial flights in the region began resuming this weekend. “So I doubt that the president will need a protracted campaign.”
But that would leave the regime in place, leaving open the possibility of a revanchist Islamic Republic that could reconstitute its military and crack down further on democratic protesters — an outcome that could create political backlash for Trump, Abrams said, after losing U.S. service members in combat.
A woman jogs amid closed shops in south Tel Aviv on Saturday.
(Olympia de Maismont / AFP / Getty Images)
“The outcome remains entirely in doubt — regime collapse after a wave of protests, civil war, a deal that leaves the regime in place behind a new face,” Abrams added. “A real test for Trump would arise if there is a wave of protests as in January, and the regime again starts shooting. Can he do nothing? Unlikely.”
In his initial speech announcing the start of the campaign, Trump addressed the people of Iran, telling them to shelter in their homes until the U.S. bombing campaign concludes.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations,” the president said. “For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond.”
But the president’s message grew muddled over the course of the last week, after he offered conflicting goals in a series of interviews with reporters.
He at once said he was expecting to hand-select the next ayatollah, after assassinating Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the opening salvo of the war. In other interviews, he said that the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign had killed many of the potential leaders that Washington could have worked with.
On Friday, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He did not specify whether he was referring to a surrender of Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, or on control over the country itself, and in a subsequent interview, said it could simply mean “when Iran no longer has the ability to fight.”
Over the last week, Kurdish leaders have shared accounts of Trump and his top aides reaching out to them and encouraging their involvement in the war, including a ground incursion in western Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan. But the president seems to have placed that effort on hold for the time being. “The war is complicated enough without having — getting the Kurds involved,” he told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One.
At Central Command headquarters on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump maintains his promise to the Iranian people at the outset of the war, that a time will come for an uprising.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth addresses the audience as President Trump listens during “The Shield of the Americas Summit“ on Saturday, a gathering with heads of state and government officials from 12 countries in the Americas at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Doral, Fla.
(Roberto Schmidt / Getty Images)
“No one’s done more than President Trump to reopen the opportunity for those who want a free Iran to do so,” Hegseth said. “Ultimately, it’s common sense, as he said up front, don’t go out and protest while bombs are dropping inside Tehran and elsewhere. There will come a moment where he determines, or they determine, that it’s time to seize that advantage.”
Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Iran, said she expects the government to survive the U.S. assault, “still easily able to outgun and outmaneuver any challenges from the streets.”
But a concerted, prolonged campaign could change that assessment.
“Of course, months of full-scale war certainly could also break the system,” Maloney said, adding: “I don’t think the short-term result would be a stable transition to a more liberal system — but rather a collapse of the state itself, and at least for some period of time, a dangerous vacuum of power and order in the heart of the Middle East.”
