The New York Times:

By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper

President Trump is considering committing the United States to another military campaign against Iran, a decision that carries the risk of igniting a conflict that could prove to be longer, deadlier and far more dangerous than last year’s 12-day war.

Last June, the United States joined a campaign against Iran that Israel had begun, and Mr. Trump gave the military a specific goal: to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities and set back Tehran’s ability to one day make a nuclear weapon. Within days of the U.S. strikes, all sides agreed to a cease-fire. There were no American casualties.

Now, the Pentagon is in the midst of the largest military buildup in the Middle East in two decades, and Mr. Trump is considering a far more expansive operation — this time led by U.S. forces — without saying publicly what he hopes to achieve. Would a campaign once again be focused on Iran’s nuclear sites? Would there be additional strikes to eviscerate Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, which Iran has insisted it would not give up through negotiation?

Or, could Mr. Trump’s goal be something he has often said was dangerous folly: using the military to remove a government in the Middle East from power? A war for regime change could lead to untold civilian deaths in Iran and a wider conflict across the region.

The president told reporters on Friday that he was weighing a limited military strike to pressure Iran into a deal.

“I guess I can say I am considering that,” he said at the start of a meeting with governors at the White House.

The ambiguity around Mr. Trump’s aims could, according to some U.S. officials and Middle East experts, be particularly dangerous, as it may lead Iran’s government to see an American-led offensive as an existential threat. As a result, Iran could escalate the conflict against the United States and Israel in ways it did not during the attacks last June, or after the U.S. military assassinated Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020.

Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said there was a risk that Iran could calculate that its muted response to previous American military operations had only invited more threats from the United States, “and that it must escalate the cost of war for the U.S.”

In a letter on Thursday to the United Nations secretary general, the head of Iran’s U.N. mission said that if Iran was attacked, then “all bases, facilities, and assets of the hostile force in the region would constitute legitimate targets,” and that the “United States would bear full and direct responsibility for any unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences.”

That could put the 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops currently stationed at 13 military bases across the Middle East at particular risk. Pentagon officials have been scrambling to move more air defense batteries to the region to protect the bases. Last June, Iran launched a volley of missiles against American troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, but Iranian officials privately warned U.S. and Qatari officials in advance.

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