The New Yorker:

So far, explanations are few and the goals—from regime change to ending a nuclear program the President already claimed to have “obliterated”—are many.

By Susan B. Glasser

In the two and a half days since Donald Trump unleashed a new war in the Middle East, the President and his Administration have come up with an astonishing array of different, even contradictory, rationales for the American military attack on Iran. By my count, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few, these include outright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of “the ability to project power outside its borders,” stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preëmptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preëmptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preëmptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program that Trump had, as recently as last week, claimed was “obliterated.” Many of these explanations are based on false premises; some already seem to have been abandoned.

All of which raises perhaps the most urgent question thus far about the most dramatic military action undertaken by the United States since the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Can the U.S. win a war of its choosing when it cannot explain why it chose to fight or what, exactly, victory would mean?

Trump himself has been the author of most of the confusion. In an eight-minute video, which was released in the predawn hours of Saturday morning, soon after the strikes began, the President vaguely warned of “imminent threats,” while offering a litany of decades-old complaints about Iran’s long and deadly campaign of terror against the U.S. and its allies. His call for regime change was explicit, though the level of American assistance to achieve that was notably ambiguous: he told Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and “now you have a President who is giving you what you want,” and he called on them to help topple “this very wicked, radical dictatorship.”

But in several quick phone interviews that he conducted with various news outlets over the weekend Trump offered a different vision for victory, suggesting to the Times that “the perfect scenario” would be a repeat of his recent intervention in Venezuela, where, after removing Nicolás Maduro from power, he abandoned the U.S.’s long-standing support for the democratic opposition and endorsed Maduro’s Vice-President to run the country. As for Iranians choosing who would rule them, our democratically elected President seemed to rule that out, all but announcing that he and he alone would pick who would run the country next.

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