Washington
President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation
for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them
on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
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Sources: Drone locations from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Boundaries from Marine Regions and Flanders Marine Institute.
As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
Officials said the president had
initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and
missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its
early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said.
Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been
fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
The abrupt reversal put a halt to
what would have been the president’s third military action against targets in
the Middle East. Mr. Trump had struck twice at targets in Syria, in 2017 and
2018.
It was not clear whether Mr.
Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration
altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether
the attacks might still go forward.
Asked about the plans for a
strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as
did Pentagon officials. No government officials asked The New York Times to
withhold the article.
The retaliation plan was intended
as a response to the shooting down of the unmanned, $130 million surveillance
drone, which was struck Thursday morning by an Iranian surface-to-air missile,
according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the military
planning and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.
The strike was set to take place
just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and
civilians.
But military officials received
word a short time later that the strike was off, at least temporarily.
The possibility of a retaliatory
strike hung over Washington for much of the day. Officials in both countries
traded accusations about the location of the drone when it was destroyed by a
surface-to-air missile launched from the Iranian coast along the Gulf of Oman.
Mr. Trump’s national security
advisers split about whether to respond militarily. Senior administration
officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national
security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military
response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result
in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.
Congressional leaders were
briefed by administration officials in the Situation Room.
The destruction of the drone
underscored the already tense relations between the two countries after Mr.
Trump’s recent accusations that Iran is to blame for explosions last week that
damaged oil tankers traveling through the strait, the vital waterway for much
of the world’s oil. Iran has denied that accusation.
Iran’s announcement this week that
it would soon breach one of the key limits it had agreed to in a 2015 pact intended to
limit its nuclear program has also fueled tensions. Mr. Trump, who pulled the United States out of the 2015 pact,
has vowed that he will not allow Tehran to build a nuclear weapon.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump insisted
that the United States’ unmanned surveillance aircraft was flying over
international waters when it was taken down by an Iranian missile.
“This drone was in international
waters, clearly,” the president told reporters on Thursday afternoon at the
White House as he began a meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada.
“We have it all documented. It’s documented scientifically, not just words.”
Asked what would come next, Mr.
Trump said, “Let’s see what happens.”
Iran’s government fiercely
disputed the president’s characterization, insisting that the American drone
had strayed into Iranian airspace. Iran released GPS coordinates that put the
drone eight miles off the country’s coast, inside the 12 nautical miles from
the shore that Iran claims as its territorial waters.
Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s
ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a letter to the Security Council
that the drone ignored repeated radio warnings before it was downed. He said
that Tehran “does not seek war” but “is determined to vigorously defend its
land, sea and air.”
Congressional Democrats emerged
from the president’s classified briefing in the Situation Room and urged Mr.
Trump to de-escalate the situation. They called on the president to seek
congressional authorization before taking any military action.
“This is a dangerous situation,”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. “We are dealing with a country that is a bad actor
in the region. We have no illusions about Iran in terms of their ballistic
missile transfers, about who they support in the region and the rest.”
Iran’s destruction of the drone
appeared to provide a boost for officials inside the Trump administration who
have long argued for a more confrontational approach to Iran, including the
possibility of military actions that could punish the regime for its support of
terrorism and other destabilizing behavior in the region.
But in his public appearance, Mr.
Trump initially seemed to be looking for a way to avoid a potentially serious
military crisis. Instead of directly accusing the leaders of Iran, Mr. Trump
said someone “loose and stupid” in Iran was responsible for shooting down the
drone.
The president said he suspected
it was some individual in Iran who “made a big mistake,” even as Iran had taken
responsibility for the strike and asserted that the high-altitude American drone
was operating over Iranian air space, which American officials denied.
Mr. Trump said the episode would
have been far more serious if the aircraft had been a piloted vehicle, and not
a drone. It made “a big, big difference” that an American pilot was not
threatened, he told reporters.
Last year, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015
nuclear pact with Iran, over the objections of China, Russia
and American allies in Europe. He has also imposed punishing economic sanctions
on Iran, trying to cut off its already limited access to international trade,
including oil sales.
Iran has warned of serious
consequences if Europe does not find a way around those
sanctions, though it has denied involvement in the attacks on
tankers near the vital Strait of Hormuz. On Monday, Iran said it would soon
stop abiding by a central component of the nuclear deal, the limit on how much
enriched uranium it is allowed to stockpile.
Both Washington and Tehran said
the downing of the drone occurred at 4:05 a.m. Thursday in Iran, or 7:35 p.m.
Wednesday in Washington. The drone “was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air
missile system while operating in international airspace over the Strait of
Hormuz,” the United States Central Command said in a statement. “This was an
unprovoked attack on a U.S. surveillance asset in international airspace.”
Iran’s ability to target and
destroy the high-altitude American drone, which was developed to evade the very
surface-to-air missiles used to bring it down, surprised some Defense
Department officials, who interpreted it as a show of how difficult Tehran can
make things for the United States as it deploys more troops and steps up
surveillance in the region.
Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, the
Air Force commander for the Central Command region in the Middle East, said the
attack could have endangered “innocent civilians,” even though officials at
Central Command continued to assert that the drone was over international
waters. He said that the closest that the drone got to the Iranian coast was 21
miles.
Late Thursday, the Defense
Department released additional imagery in an email to support its case that the
drone never entered Iranian airspace. But the department incorrectly called the
flight path of the drone the location of the shooting down and offered little
context for an image that appeared to be the drone exploding in midair.
It was the latest attempt by the
Pentagon to try to prove that Iran has been the aggressor in a series of
international incidents.
Iran’s foreign affairs minister,
Mohammad Javad Zarif, said in a post on Twitter that he gave what he said were
precise coordinates for where the American drone was targeted.
“At 00:14 US drone took off from
UAE in stealth mode & violated Iranian airspace,” he said in a tweet that included
coordinates that he said were near Kouh-e Mobarak. “We’ve retrieved sections of
the US military drone in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down.”
Mr. Trump’s comments on Thursday
afternoon in the Oval Office reflected the longstanding tension between the
president’s desire to be seen as tough on the world stage and his campaign
promise to make sure that the United States did not get tangled in more foreign
wars.
The president has embraced a
reputation as someone who punches back when he is challenged. Only months into
his tenure, Mr. Trump launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at
an air base in Syria after a chemical weapon attack.
But he has often talked about
ending American involvement in long-running conflicts abroad, describing his
“America First” agenda as having little room for being the world’s police
force. In a tweet in January,
he said he hoped that “Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of
judgement mistakes” would “eventually come to a glorious end!”
According to Iranian news media,
a foreign minister spokesman there said that flying a drone into Iranian
airspace was an “aggressive and provocative” move by the United States.
Hossein Salami, the commander in
chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, said crossing the country’s
border was “our red line,” the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported.
“We are not going to get engaged
in a war with any country, but we are fully prepared for war,” Mr. Salami said
at a military ceremony in Sanandaj, Iran, according to a translation from Press
TV, a state-run news outlet. “Today’s incident was a clear sign of this precise
message, so we are continuing our resistance.”
Iranian news media said the drone
had flown over Iranian territory unauthorized, and reported that it had been
shot down in the Hormozgan Province, along the country’s southern coast on the
Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
Both the United States and Iran
identified the aircraft as an RQ-4 Global Hawk, a surveillance drone made by
Northrop Grumman.
“This was a show of force — their
equivalent of an inside pitch,” said Derek Chollet, a former assistant
secretary of defense for international security affairs during the Obama
administration, speaking of Iran’s decision to shoot down the drone.
James G. Stavridis, who retired as
a four-star admiral after serving as the supreme allied commander at the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, warned that the two countries were in a dangerous
game that could quickly spiral out of control. He described Iran’s downing of
the drone, which costs about $130 million, as a “logical albeit highly
dangerous escalatory move by Iran.” - The New York Times
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