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Most members of President Donald Trump’s administration have tried to stay on message: Strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities do not signal the beginning of a war, and the US is not trying to bring about regime change in Iran.
“We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President JD Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
Ditto with regime change. “This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at the Pentagon Sunday morning.
But then Trump — who is always master of his own message — put things a bit differently on Sunday night.
“Why wouldn’t there be a Regime change???” he asked on social media, suggesting he would like very much like to see new leadership in Tehran “if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday at the White House the post was rhetorical.
“The president was just simply raising a question that I think many people around the world are asking,” Leavitt said, adding that if Iran’s regime still refuses to give up its nuclear ambitions or engage in diplomacy, “Why shouldn’t the Iranian people rise up against this brutal terrorist regime?”
“But as far as our military posture, it hasn’t changed,” she said.
The message Leavitt expressed on Trump’s behalf is an important one, since Trump promised as a candidate to get the US out of wars. And the US has a long and sordid history of trying to change regimes both in the Middle East generally and Iran in particular.
In the 1950s, the CIA and British intelligence helped spark a coup against Iran’s democratically elected leader, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who nationalized the country’s oil reserves. The CIA did not acknowledge its involvement until decades later.
The US also helped prop up the monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the shah of Iran until he was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution that turned the country into the Islamic Republic it is today.
CNN’s Harmeet Kaur and Ivana Kottasová have an excellent visual timeline of how we got to the current US conflict with Iran.
And US involvement with toppling governments in the Middle East extends much further than Iran.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, the US, working with its NATO allies, dislodged the Taliban in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, the US handed control of the country back to the Taliban, a plan first hatched by Trump during his first term but finalized by President Joe Biden.
Two different presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, launched invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003.
The first was a limited and successful war meant to kick Iraqi forces out of neighboring Kuwait, but did not dislodge then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The second had regime change as one of its goals when American forces invaded Iraq on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The US had previously backed Hussein and funded him in a war against Iran in the 1980s.
The George W. Bush administration had gone to great lengths to make the case for its invasion, including with presentations at the United Nations.
A major difference today is that Trump has not provided evidence to support the idea that Iran’s development of nuclear weapons was imminent. Instead, he simply launched attacks in conjunction with Israel.
There are clear similarities between ‘03 and now, since it’s the threat of a Middle Eastern nation having weapons of mass destruction driving the use of US military power.
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, now a CNN senior political commentator, served in the Air Force in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
A frequent Trump critic, Kinzinger said he supports the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. But he said on “State of the Union” Sunday that comparisons between the runup to the Iraq invasion and now are “kind of lazy.”
The ‘03 Iraq invasion featured hundreds of thousands of US troops mobilized, Kinzinger said, with the express purpose of toppling Hussein. Compare that with what so far has been one set of B-2 bomber strikes.
“If regime change comes, it’ll come from within. There are all kinds of competing factions within Iran,” Kinzinger told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “It won’t be us … it’s in their interest to de-escalate right now because they are fighting for the survival of their regime.”
Iran’s initial response did seem to invite de-escalation. It fired missiles toward one of the smattering of US bases peppered around the region, in Qatar, but they were all intercepted by defense systems.
There are other more recent examples of the US essentially pursuing regime change without calling it that, as President Barack Obama’s administration did, with help from NATO, in Libya. Longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi was toppled, but the country was destabilized.
Both Obama and Trump in his first administration talked about their desire to see President Bashar al-Assad ousted in Syria and launched bombing campaigns in response to his use of chemical weapons. Assad did not finally lose his grip on power until last year, when rebel groups in the country formed an alliance and drove him to exile in Russia.
The GOP under Trump has veered away from the foreign policy of Republicans such as Kinzinger and toward the nationalism usually espoused by Trump. His decision to bomb Iran exposes a fissure in his own coalition.
“MAGA is not for foreign wars. We are not for regime change,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican.
Trump has also argued that the bombings were a major success and seriously degraded Iran’s capabilities. But it is still unclear what damage was done or whether Iran had moved its uranium elsewhere before the strikes.
“This is not a problem that’s been solved. This is going to be open-ended,” Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday.
“What I take from this is the Iranians are going to make a serious effort to reconstitute their program,” Haass said. “I expect there’s many people in Tehran who are saying, if we had had a nuclear weapon, none of this would have happened.”
Hass also does not see the current situation blowing up into a full-on war between the US and Iran, but that doesn’t mean hostilities will just stop.
“You could have a prolonged, low-level, intermittent war,” Haass said, suggesting the US or Israel might find reason to strike at Iran periodically in the coming years.
“It becomes the background,” he said.
