NY Times reports how Netanyahu took the US into Iran War

The black S.U.V. carrying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived at the White
House just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 11. The Israeli leader, who had been pressing for months for the United
States to agree to a major assault on Iran, was whisked inside with little ceremony, out of view of
reporters, primed for one of the most high-stakes moments in his long career.

U.S. and Israeli officials gathered first in the Cabinet Room, adjacent to the
Oval Office. Then Mr. Netanyahu headed downstairs for the main event: a highly classified presentation on
Iran for President Trump and his team in the White House Situation Room, which was rarely used for in-person
meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Trump sat down, but not in his usual position at the head of the room’s
mahogany conference table. Instead, the president took a seat on one side, facing the large screens mounted
along the wall. Mr. Netanyahu sat on the other side, directly opposite the president.

Appearing on the screen behind the prime minister was David Barnea, the director
of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, as well as Israeli military officials. Arrayed visually
behind Mr. Netanyahu, they created the image of a wartime leader surrounded by his team.

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, sat at the far end of the table.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who doubled as the national security adviser, had taken his regular seat.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who generally
sat together in such settings, were on one side; joining them was John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director. Jared
Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, who had been negotiating
with the Iranians, rounded out the main group.

The gathering had been kept deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top
cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening. Also absent was the vice president. JD Vance was in
Azerbaijan, and the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in
time.

The presentation that Mr. Netanyahu would make over the next hour would be
pivotal in setting the United States and Israel on the path toward a major armed conflict in the middle of
one of the world’s most volatile regions. And it would lead to a series of discussions inside the White
House over the following days and weeks, the details of which have not been previously reported, in which
Mr. Trump weighed his options and the risks before giving the go-ahead to join Israel in attacking Iran.

[Editor’s note: Iran has been one of Israel’s targets for over 40 years.]

This account of how Mr. Trump took the United States into war is drawn from
reporting for a forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” It
reveals how the deliberations inside the administration highlighted the president’s instincts, his inner
circle’s fractures and the way he runs the White House. It draws on extensive interviews conducted on the
condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions and sensitive issues.

The reporting underscores how closely Mr. Trump’s hawkish thinking aligned with
Mr. Netanyahu’s over many months, more so than even some of the president’s key advisers recognized. Their
close association has been an enduring feature across two administrations, and that dynamic — however
fraught at times — has fueled intense criticism and suspicion on both the left and the right of American
politics.

And it shows how, in the end, even the more skeptical members of Mr. Trump’s war
cabinet — with the stark exception of Mr. Vance, the figure inside the White House most opposed to a
full-scale war — deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would
be quick and decisive. The White House declined to comment.

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that
Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally
bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a
montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among
those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who
had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic
government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to
near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would
be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land
blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would
begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an
intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The
Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground
front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

Mr. Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to
land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.

Sounds good to me, Mr. Trump told the prime minister. To Mr. Netanyahu, this
signaled a likely green light for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

Mr. Netanyahu was not the only one who came away from the meeting with the
impression that Mr. Trump had all but made up his mind. The president’s advisers could see that he had been
deeply impressed by the promise of what Mr. Netanyahu’s military and intelligence services could do, just as
he had been when the two men spoke before the 12-day war with Iran in June.

Earlier in his White House visit on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu had tried to focus the
minds of the Americans assembled in the Cabinet Room on the existential threat posed by Iran’s 86-year-old
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

When others in the room asked the prime minister about possible risks in the
operation, Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged these but made one central point: In his view, the risks of inaction
were greater than the risks of action. He argued that the price of action would only grow if they delayed
striking and allowed Iran more time to accelerate its missile production and create a shield of immunity
around its nuclear program.

Everyone in the room understood that Iran had the capacity to build up its
missile and drone stockpiles at a far lower cost and much more quickly than the United States could build
and supply the much more expensive interceptors to protect American interests and allies in the region.

Mr. Netanyahu’s presentations — and Mr. Trump’s positive response to them —
created an urgent task for the U.S. intelligence community. Overnight, analysts worked to assess the
viability of what the Israeli team had told the president.

‘Farcical’ US experts disagree with Netanyahu’sclaims

The results of the U.S. intelligence analysis were shared the following day, Feb.
12, in another meeting for only American officials in the Situation Room. Before Mr. Trump arrived, two
senior intelligence officials briefed the president’s inner circle.

The intelligence officials had deep expertise in U.S. military capabilities, and
they knew the Iranian system and its players inside out. They had broken down Mr. Netanyahu’s presentation
into four parts. First was decapitation — killing the ayatollah. Second was crippling Iran’s capacity to
project power and threaten its neighbors. Third was a popular uprising inside Iran. And fourth was regime
change, with a secular leader installed to govern the country.

The U.S. officials assessed that the first two objectives were achievable with
American intelligence and military power. They assessed that the third and fourth parts of Mr. Netanyahu’s
pitch, which included the possibility of the Kurds mounting a ground invasion of Iran, were detached from
reality.

When Mr. Trump joined the meeting, Mr. Ratcliffe briefed him on the assessment.
The C.I.A. director used one word to describe the Israeli prime minister’s regime change scenarios:
“farcical.”

At that point, Mr. Rubio cut in. “In other words, it’s bullshit,” he said.

Mr. Ratcliffe added that given the unpredictability of events in any conflict,
regime change could happen, but it should not be considered an achievable objective.

Several others jumped in, including Mr. Vance, just back from Azerbaijan, who
also expressed strong skepticism about the prospect of regime change.

The president then turned to General Caine. “General, what do you think?”

General Caine replied: “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating
procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they
need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Mr. Trump quickly weighed the assessment. Regime change, he said, would be “their
problem.” It was unclear whether he was referring to the Israelis or the Iranian people. But the bottom line
was that his decision on whether to go to war against Iran would not hinge on whether Parts 3 and 4 of Mr.
Netanyahu’s presentation were achievable.

Mr. Trump appeared to remain very interested in accomplishing Parts 1 and 2:
killing the ayatollah and Iran’s top leaders and dismantling the Iranian military.

General Caine — the man Mr. Trump liked to refer to as “Razin’ Caine” — had
impressed the president years earlier by telling him the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly
than others had projected. Mr. Trump rewarded that confidence by elevating the general, who had been an Air
Force fighter pilot, to be his top military adviser. General Caine was not a political loyalist, and he had
serious concerns about a war with Iran. But he was very cautious in the way he presented his views to the
president.

As the small team of advisers who were looped into the plans deliberated over the
following days, General Caine shared with Mr. Trump and others the alarming military assessment that a major
campaign against Iran would drastically deplete stockpiles of American weaponry, including missile
interceptors, whose supply had been strained after years of support for Ukraine and Israel. General Caine
saw no clear path to quickly replenishing these stockpiles.

He also flagged the enormous difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz and the
risks of Iran blocking it. Mr. Trump had dismissed that possibility on the assumption that the regime would
capitulate before it came to that. The president appeared to think it would be a very quick war — an
impression that had been reinforced by the tepid response to the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities
in June.

General Caine’s role in the lead-up to the war captured a classic tension between
military counsel and presidential decision-making. So persistent was the chairman in not taking a stand —
repeating that it was not his role to tell the president what to do, but rather to present options along
with potential risks and possible second- and third-order consequences — that he could appear to some of
those listening to be arguing all sides of an issue simultaneously.

He would constantly ask, “And then what?” But Mr. Trump would often seem to hear
only what he wanted to hear.

General Caine differed in almost every way from a prior chairman, Gen. Mark A.
Milley, who had argued vociferously with Mr. Trump during his first administration and who saw his role as
stopping the president from taking dangerous or reckless actions.

One person familiar with their interactions noted that Mr. Trump had a habit of
confusing tactical advice from General Caine with strategic counsel. In practice, that meant the general
might warn in one breath about the difficulties of one aspect of the operation, then in the next note that
the United States had an essentially unlimited supply of cheap, precision-guided bombs and could strike Iran
for weeks once it achieved air superiority.

To the chairman, these were separate observations. But Mr. Trump appeared to
think that the second most likely canceled out the first.

At no point during the deliberations did the chairman directly tell the president
that war with Iran was a terrible idea — though some of General Caine’s colleagues believed that was exactly
what he thought.

Trump the Hawk

Distrusted as Mr. Netanyahu was by many of the president’s advisers, the prime
minister’s view of the situation was far closer to Mr. Trump’s opinion than the anti-interventionists on the
Trump team or in the broader “America First” movement liked to admit. This had been true for many years.

Of all the foreign policy challenges Mr. Trump had confronted across two
presidencies, Iran stood apart. He regarded it as a uniquely dangerous adversary and was willing to take
great risks to hinder the regime’s ability to wage war or to acquire a nuclear weapon. Furthermore, Mr.
Netanyahu’s pitch had dovetailed with Mr. Trump’s desire to dismantle the Iranian theocracy, which had
seized power in 1979, when Mr. Trump was 32. It had been a thorn in the side of the United States ever
since.

Now, he could become the first president since the clerical leadership took over
47 years ago to pull off regime change in Iran. Usually unmentioned but always in the background was the
added motivation that Iran had plotted to kill Mr. Trump as revenge over the assassination in January 2020
of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who was seen in the United States as a driving force behind an Iranian campaign of
international terrorism.

Back in office for a second term, Mr. Trump’s confidence in the U.S. military’s
abilities had only grown. He was especially emboldened by the spectacular commando raid to capture the
Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from his compound on Jan. 3. No American lives were lost in the operation,
yet more evidence to the president of the unmatched prowess of U.S. forces.

Within the cabinet, Mr. Hegseth was the biggest proponent of a military campaign
against Iran.

Mr. Rubio indicated to colleagues that he was much more ambivalent. He did not
believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal, but his preference was to continue a campaign of
maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war. Mr. Rubio, however, did not try to talk Mr. Trump out
of the operation, and after the war began he delivered the administration’s justification with full
conviction.

Ms. Wiles had concerns about what a new conflict overseas could entail, but she
did not tend to weigh in hard on military matters in larger meetings; rather, she encouraged advisers to
share their views and concerns with the president in those settings. Ms. Wiles would exert influence on many
other issues, but in the room with Mr. Trump and the generals, she sat back. Those close to her said she did
not view it as her role to share her concerns with the president on a military decision in front of others.
And she believed that the expertise of advisers like General Caine, Mr. Ratcliffe and Mr. Rubio was more
significant for the president to hear.

Still, Ms. Wiles had told colleagues that she worried about the United States
being dragged into another war in the Middle East. An attack on Iran carried with it the potential to set
off soaring gas prices months before midterm elections that could help decide whether the final two years of
Mr. Trump’s second term would be years of accomplishment or subpoenas from House Democrats. But in the end,
Ms. Wiles was on board with the operation.

Vance the Skeptic

Nobody in Mr. Trump’s inner circle was more worried about the prospect of war
with Iran, or did more to try to stop it, than the vice president.

Mr. Vance had built his political career opposing precisely the kind of military
adventurism that was now under serious consideration. He had described a war with Iran as “a huge
distraction of resources” and “massively expensive.”

He was not, however, a dove across the board. In January, when Mr. Trump publicly
warned Iran to stop killing protesters and promised that help was on its way, Mr. Vance had privately
encouraged the president to enforce his red line. But what the vice president pushed for was a limited,
punitive strike, something closer to the model of Mr. Trump’s missile attack against Syria in 2017 over the
use of chemical weapons against civilians.

The vice president thought a regime-change war with Iran would be a disaster. His
preference was for no strikes at all. But knowing that Mr. Trump was likely to intervene in some fashion, he
tried to steer toward more limited action. Later, when it seemed certain that the president was set on a
large-scale campaign, Mr. Vance argued that he should do so with overwhelming force, in the hope of
achieving his objectives quickly.

In front of his colleagues, Mr. Vance warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran
could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political
coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars.

Mr. Vance raised other concerns, too. As vice president, he was aware of the
scope of America’s munitions problem. A war against a regime with enormous will for survival could leave the
United States in a far worse position to fight conflicts for some years.

The vice president told associates that no amount of military insight could truly
gauge what Iran would do in retaliation when survival of the regime was at stake. A war could easily go in
unpredictable directions. Moreover, he thought there seemed to be little chance of building a peaceful Iran
in the aftermath.

Beyond all of this was perhaps the biggest risk of all: Iran held the advantage
when it came to the Strait of Hormuz. If this narrow waterway carrying vast quantities of oil and natural
gas was choked off, the domestic consequences in the United States would be severe, starting with higher
gasoline prices.

Tucker Carlson, the commentator who had emerged as another prominent skeptic of
intervention on the right, had come to the Oval Office several times over the previous year to warn Mr.
Trump that a war with Iran would destroy his presidency. A couple weeks before the war began, Mr. Trump, who
had known Mr. Carlson for years, tried to reassure him over the phone. “I know you’re worried about it, but
it’s going to be OK,” the president said. Mr. Carlson asked how he knew. “Because it always is,” Mr. Trump
replied.

In the final days of February, the Americans and the Israelis discussed a piece
of new intelligence that would significantly accelerate their timeline. The ayatollah would be meeting above
ground with other top officials of the regime, in broad daylight and wide open for an air attack. It was a
fleeting chance to strike at the heart of Iran’s leadership, the kind of target that might not present
itself again.

Mr. Trump gave Iran another chance to come to a deal that would block its path to
nuclear weapons. The diplomacy also gave the United States extra time to move military assets to the Middle
East.

The president had effectively made up his mind weeks earlier, several of his
advisers said. But he had not yet decided exactly when. Now, Mr. Netanyahu urged him to move fast.

That same week, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff called from Geneva after the latest
talks with Iranian officials. Over three rounds of negotiations in Oman and Switzerland, the two had tested
Iran’s willingness to make a deal. At one point, they offered the Iranians free nuclear fuel for the life of
their program — a test of whether Tehran’s insistence on enrichment was truly about civilian energy or about
preserving the ability to build a bomb.

The Iranians rejected the offer, calling it an assault on their dignity.

Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff laid out the picture for the president. They could
probably negotiate something, but it would take months, they said. If Mr. Trump was asking whether they
could look him in the eye and tell him they could solve the problem, it was going to take a lot to get
there, Mr. Kushner told him, because the Iranians were playing games.

‘I Think We Need to Do It’

On Thursday, Feb. 26, around 5 p.m., a final Situation Room meeting got underway.
By now, the positions of everyone in the room were clear. Everything had been discussed in previous
meetings; everyone knew everyone else’s stance. The discussion would last about an hour and a half.

Mr. Trump was in his usual place at the head of the table. To his right sat the
vice president; next to Mr. Vance was Ms. Wiles, then Mr. Ratcliffe, then the White House counsel, David
Warrington, then Steven Cheung, the White House communications director. Across from Mr. Cheung was Karoline
Leavitt, the White House press secretary; to her right was General Caine, then Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Rubio.

The war-planning group had been kept so tight that the two key officials who
would need to manage the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market, Treasury
Secretary Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, were excluded, as was Tulsi Gabbard, the director
of national intelligence.

The president opened the meeting, asking, OK, what have we got?

Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Caine ran through the sequencing of the attacks. Then Mr.
Trump said he wanted to go around the table and hear everyone’s views.

Mr. Vance, whose disagreement with the whole premise was well established,
addressed the president: You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.

Ms. Wiles told Mr. Trump that if he felt he needed to proceed for America’s
national security, then he should go ahead.

Mr. Ratcliffe offered no opinion on whether to proceed, but he discussed the
stunning new intelligence that the Iranian leadership was about to gather in the ayatollah’s compound in
Tehran. The C.I.A. director told the president that regime change was possible depending on how the term was
defined. “If we just mean killing the supreme leader, we can probably do that,” he said.

When called on, Mr. Warrington, the White House counsel, said it was a legally
permissible option in terms of how the plan had been conceived by U.S. officials and presented to the
president. He did not offer a personal opinion, but when pressed by the president to provide one, he said
that as a Marine veteran he had known an American service member killed by Iran years earlier. This issue
remained deeply personal. He told the president that if Israel intended to proceed regardless, the United
States should do so as well.

Mr. Cheung laid out the likely public relations fallout: Mr. Trump had run for
office opposed to further wars. People had not voted for conflict overseas. The plans ran contrary, too, to
everything the administration had said after the bombing campaign against Iran in June. How would they
explain away eight months of insisting that Iranian nuclear facilities had been totally obliterated? Mr.
Cheung gave neither a yes nor a no, but he said that whatever decision Mr. Trump made would be the right
one.

Ms. Leavitt told the president that this was his decision and that the press team
would manage it as best they could.

Mr. Hegseth adopted a narrow position: They would have to take care of the
Iranians eventually, so they might as well do it now. He offered technical assessments: They could run the
campaign in a certain amount of time with a given level of forces.

General Caine was sober, laying out the risks and what the campaign would mean
for munitions depletion. He offered no opinion; his position was that if Mr. Trump ordered the operation,
the military would execute. Both of the president’s top military leaders previewed how the campaign would
unfold and the U.S. capacity to degrade Iran’s military capabilities.

When it was his turn to speak, Mr. Rubio offered more clarity, telling the
president: If our goal is regime change or an uprising, we shouldn’t do it. But if the goal is to destroy
Iran’s missile program, that’s a goal we can achieve.

Everyone deferred to the president’s instincts. They had seen him make bold
decisions, take on unfathomable risks and somehow come out on top. No one would impede him now.

“I think we need to do it,” the president told the room. He said they had to make
sure Iran could not have a nuclear weapon, and they had to ensure that Iran could not just shoot missiles at
Israel or throughout the region.

General Caine told Mr. Trump that he had some time; he did not need to give the
go-ahead until 4 p.m. the following day.

Aboard Air Force One the next afternoon, 22 minutes before General Caine’s
deadline, Mr. Trump sent the following order: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”