‘war Of Choice’: Trump Says Iran Was Preparing Attack But Has Provided No Evidence

The Trump administration is making the case that it ordered expansive, deadly strikes to stop an imminent threat from Tehran, but is providing no evidence Iran had such plans.

The White House, amid the largest military buildup in the region in decades, has yet to explain to the public or to Congress what Iranian threat prompted the massive attacks that have upended the region and could draw the U.S. into another Middle East war.

The administration first tested out its justification more than 12 hours after the U.S. began bombarding Iran with missiles, drones and long-range artillery. A senior Trump administration official told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had determined American troops would have suffered far more casualties by waiting for an impending Iranian strike. In the same briefing, two other officials said the president ordered the strikes after he determined Iran would not agree to stop uranium enrichment altogether.

But the administration’s efforts to construct a case for war only after the shots have started flying has few historical parallels. The Pentagon has held no briefings nearly 36 hours after the U.S. military strikes, bucking a practice of doing so after attacks that goes back to the Vietnam War. And unlike past presidents embarking on major military campaigns, Trump made little effort to drum up support from Congress, U.S. allies or the American people. The administration did not try to convince the Senate to authorize the war, as President George W. Bush did in Iraq, or plead to the United Nations, as George H.W. Bush did to build a coalition against Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait.

“Whatever imminent threat they're posing was likely in reaction to our unprecedented military buildup in the region,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.). “This is an example of the president deciding what he wanted to do, and then making his administration go and find whatever argument they could make to justify it.”

The administration briefed some Hill staffers Sunday on the operation. But officials did not present clear evidence the Iranians were preparing an imminent attack on U.S. troops, said two people who attended. They, like others in this report, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe will give an Iran briefing to House members on Tuesday, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting. They will also meet with senators, according to two people familiar with the plans.

Trump, in an eight-minute video on Truth Social after the first wave of attacks, said Iran had continued to develop long-range missiles that could threaten Europe and U.S. troops — although American intelligence agencies have assessed Tehran won’t acquire those weapons for years.

The president, in a second video posted online Sunday, said operations will continue and U.S. casualties will likely mount. But Trump has not formally addressed the country or taken questions about his decision to deploy force, other than brief one-on-one calls with several media outlets. His actions are a surprising reversal from campaign promises he made to end forever wars and from his criticism of longstanding American nation-building in the Middle East during a speech last year in Saudi Arabia.

“The interventionists,” Trump said, “were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

U.S. Central Command has said the strikes were “prioritizing locations that posed an imminent threat,” including Iranian air defense, drone and missile launch sites and military airfields. But it has not mentioned anything specific about a time-sensitive threat to U.S. troops.

“The United States did not start this conflict,” Hegseth said Saturday evening in an X post, “but we will finish it.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

The CIA had spent several weeks making inroads with some Iranian officials, according to a person familiar with the covert effort. The intelligence informed the timing and location of Saturday’s strikes that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, the person added.

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions to the White House.

The White House, in a statement, said diplomacy had been Trump’s preferred course of action and that “his representatives worked extensively, and in good faith, to make a deal that would ensure that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities posed no threat to our homeland. Unfortunately, the Iranian regime refused to engage realistically with the United States.”

But a growing number of skeptics of the administration’s justification are emerging, especially after the first U.S. troops were killed Sunday in an Iranian retaliatory strike.

Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.), who was among committee leaders briefed by senior officials last week, told CNN he had seen no intelligence “that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America.”

The president, he said, has “started a war of choice.”

Iran, and its proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis, presented ongoing threats, and U.S. bases in the region faced real risks, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a Senate Armed Services member, said in an interview. But he argued those dangers were being managed with existing U.S. and allied air and missile defense systems.

“They simply don't have a missile that can reach the United States, and probably won't for years, ” he said.

The administration’s defenders in Congress also shied away from discussing any Iranian plans. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) on Sunday repeated the word “imminent” to describe the threat in a CBS interview, but resisted getting more specific.

Experts did not see immediate danger ahead of the strikes. Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a membership organization dedicated to nonproliferation, noted last week that it would take Iran months to enrich sufficient material for a weapon and years to rebuild nuclear facilities the U.S. military damaged last year.

Richard Haass, the Council on Foreign Relations president and a former State Department official under George W. Bush described the threat posed by Iran as manageable.

That, he said, makes this a “preventive, not a preemptive war.”

Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.