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The president has been deterred from going ahead with a strike through advisers who warned that this could become a wider shock in his final weeks in office.
By Eric Schmitt, Maggie Haberman, David E. Sanger, Helene Cooper and Lara Jakes
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Trump asked senior advisers Thursday at an Oval Office assembly whether he had the characteristics to take action contrary to Iran’s main nuclear power in the coming weeks. 4 existing and former U. S. officials said Monday.
A number of high-level advisers discouraged the president from launching an army attack. Advisers: Added Vice President Mike Pence; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Christopher C. Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense; and General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that an attack on Iranian comforts could turn into a wider confrontation in the final weeks of Trump’s presidency.
Any attack, whether with missiles or cybernetics, would almost actually focus on Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Wednesday that Iran’s uranium reserves are now 12 times larger than legal ones through the nuclear deal than Trump abandoned in 2018. He also noted that Iran had not allowed him access to some other suspicious site where there is evidence of nuclear activity beyond.
Trump asked his most sensible national security aides what characteristics they were going to have and how to respond, officials said.
After Pompeo and General Milley described the potential dangers of the army escalation, officials left the assembly thinking that a missile attack within Iran was irrelevant, according to management officials informed about the assembly.
Trump can still seek tactics to attack Iranian assets and allies, adding militias in Iraq, officials said. A small organization of national security assistants met Wednesday night to discuss Iran the day before the assembly with the president.
White House officials responded to requests for comment.
The episode highlighted how Trump still faces a diversity of global threats in his final weeks in office: an attack opposing Iran would possibly not work well for his base, which largely opposes a deeper U. S. clash in the Middle East. However, it can also poison relations with Tehran, which would be much more complicated for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as it pledged to do.
Ever since Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other high-level Pentagon advisers last week, the Department of Defense and other national security officials have privately expressed fears that the president may simply launch operations, open or covert, opposed to Iran or other adversaries. at final. de his mandate.
The occasions of the last few days are not the first time that Iranian politics has emerged in recent days from a management that is leaving. During the final days of Bush’s ten management in 2008, Israeli officials said Obama’s new management sought to save him. to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, sought bunker destroyer bombs, bombers and intelligence assistance to the United States for an Israeli-led attack project.
Later, Vice President Dick Cheney wrote in his memoirs that he supported the idea, but President George W. Bush did not, but the result was a much closer collaboration with Israel in a cyberattack on the Natanz facility, which destroyed some 1,000 Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
Since then, the Pentagon has reviewed its attack plans several times. It now has classic army features like cyber features, and some mix both, some involving direct action across Israel.
The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that Iran now had a reserve of more than 2,442 kilograms, or more than 5,385 pounds, of low-enriched uranium, which is enough to produce about two nuclear weapons, according to research from the report through the Institute. For international science and security, but it would take several months of additional processing to enrich uranium with bomb-safe material, Iran would not be near a bomb until last spring at the very soon, long after Trump is said to have left office.
While the amount is worrying, it is less than the amount of fuel Iran had before President Barack Obama reached a nuclear deal with Tehran in July 2015. By the end of this year, under the terms of the agreement, Iran sent about 97% of Russia, about 25,000 pounds, leaving it less than it would take to build a single weapon.
The Iranians respected those limits even after Trump canceled U. S. involvement in the Iran deal in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions. The Iranians slowly began to break those limits last year, noting that if Trump felt relaxed to violate his terms, they would not continue to comply with them.
But the Iranians barely ran to produce new equipment: their progress was slow and steady, and they denied that they had tried to build a weapon; the country’s stolen evidence several years ago through Israel obviously showed that this was the plan before 2003.
Trump has argued since the 2016 crusade that Iran has been hiding some of its movements and deceiving its commitments; Last week’s inspectors’ report provided him with the first partial evidence of this view. The report criticized Iran for not answering a series of questions about a warehouse in Tehran where inspectors discovered uranium particles, suggesting that it was once a type of nuclear processing facility. According to the report, Iran’s responses “were not technically credible. “
The International Atomic Energy Agency had already complained that inspectors were not allowed to read completely about certain suspicious sites.
Pompeo, officials said, is not only the U. S. military that has options, it is largely tracking occasions on the ground in Iraq on suspicion of aggression through Iran or its proxy militias opposed to U. S. diplomats or troops stationed there.
Pompeo has already drawn up plans to close the U. S. Embassy in Baghdad for considerations of possible threats, in recent days he seemed willing to leave that resolution to the next administration. Mortar and rocket attacks on the embassy have been reduced in recent weeks, and the task of completing the world’s largest U. S. diplomatic project can take months.
But officials said that could replace if Americans were killed before Inauguration Day.
Officials are involved on the January 3rd anniversary of the U. S. attack that killed Major General Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Iraqi leader of an Iranian-backed defense force, who died that Iranian. leaders insist that they have not yet taken revenge.
Pompeo, who has been the top supporter among Pompeo’s advisers. Trump is bothering Iran while management can still do so, he said more recently that the death of an American is a red line that can drive an army response.
Tensions between Washington and Baghdad would also increase. Diplomats said Iraq’s prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, would almost oppose the killing of Iraqis, including Iranian-backed militiamen, on Iraqi soil through U. S. forces already facing exit requests.
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