President Trump said Monday that he had authorized a new wave of attacks against Iran this week but that he was holding off after three Gulf leaders requested more time negotiate a nuclear deal.
In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said he told his top military officials not to follow through with the attack he had planned for Tuesday but instructed them to prepare for a “full, large scale assault of Iran” if “an acceptable Deal is not reached.”
Mr. Trump has publicly threatened for weeks to restart military strikes against Iran, as he has grown frustrated with a war that he said would be finished in six weeks but has now dragged on for more than two months.
U.S. military officials say that in the months since the war started, the Iranian regime has demonstrated both enormous resilience and the ability to inflict significant damage to the region and on the global economy.
Despite his tough talk, Mr. Trump has repeatedly backed down from renewed strikes that would plunge the United States back into an unpopular, expensive war. Instead, he has given Iran and meditating countries more time to strike a deal even as negotiations over their nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz have stalled out.
A new New York Times/Siena poll found that 64 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was the wrong one, with a majority of voters registering discontent with the economic costs associated with the conflict.
Mr. Trump has rejected multiple proposals from Iran, demanding more concessions on their nuclear program.
On Monday, Mr. Trump said the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates asked him to postpone military strikes because they believed they could strike a deal with Iran that would satisfy the United States.
Mr. Trump reiterated that he would require any deal to prohibit Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. That very demand, however, has been among the biggest impediments to any deal between the United States and Iran, as the two countries have been unable to agree on terms of a nuclear deal.
Mr. Trump did not specify what targets the United States planned to strike on Tuesday, but officials said the military had developed a variety of options, including targeting the country’s ballistic missile sites.
Iran has used the monthlong cease-fire with the United States to dig out scores of bombed ballistic missile sites, move mobile missile launchers, and, despite significant losses, adjust its tactics for any resumption of strikes, said a U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
Many of Iran’s ballistic missiles were deployed from deep underground caves and other facilities carved out of granite mountains that are difficult for American attack aircraft to destroy, the official said. As a result, the United States largely bombed the portals of the sites, collapsing and burying them — but not destroying them. Iran has now dug out a significant number of those sites.
Iranian commanders, possibly with Russian help, studied the flight patterns of American fighter jets and bombers, the U.S. military official said. The official warned that the downing of the F-15E jet last month and the groundfire that struck a F-35 revealed that American flight tactics had become too predictable in ways that allowed Iran to defend against them more capably.
Perhaps most important, the U.S. military official said that while five weeks of intensive bombing may have killed several Iranian leaders and commanders, the war has left a more hardened, resilient adversary. The official added that the Iranians had repositioned many of their remaining arms and instilled a belief that Iran can successfully resist the United States, whether by effectively blocking the Strait of Hormuz, attacking energy infrastructure in neighboring Gulf states or threatening American aircraft.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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