Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disputed the characterization that he dragged the United States into the war with Iran, citing President Donald Trump’s strong personality.
“Does anyone really think that someone can tell President [Donald] Trump what to do? Come on,” he said during a Thursday press conference, adding that the American president “always makes his decisions on what he thinks is good for America.”
Trump and members of his Cabinet have faced questions since the war began about the specific threat Iran posed to the United States, why they decided to fight now, and whether it was in the U.S.’s strategic interest to start another Middle East war.
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Joe Kent, the now-former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned earlier this week, and in his resignation letter, which he shared publicly, he alleged the U.S. had been persuaded into the war by Israeli interests.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote.
“This echo chamber was used to deceive [Trump] into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should [Trump] strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war,” he continued.
The U.S. and Israel are operating parallel wars against Iran, and the slight deviations in their objectives are starting to become more apparent.
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“The objectives that have been laid out by the president are different from the objectives that have been laid out by the Israeli government,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday morning.
“We can see through the operations that the Israeli government has been focused on disabling the Iranian leadership and taking out several members, obviously beginning with the ayatollah, the supreme leader, and they continue to focus on that effort,” she added.
Israeli forces have targeted several senior Iranian leaders over the course of the nearly three-week war, most notably the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed during the opening strikes of the war. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was selected to succeed his father, though his status has been in question as he’s believed to have been injured in the strikes that killed his father.
They have more recently targeted and killed Iran’s national security secretary, Ali Larijani; commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Basij unit, Gholamreza Soleimani; and senior Iranian intelligence official Esmaeil Khatib.
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CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who testified alongside Gabbard, told lawmakers that regime change is not a goal of the U.S. war against Iran, but “that may be different from what Israel’s objectives were.”
Israeli forces attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, and they responded by targeting and hitting an oil facility in Saudi Arabia, two Kuwaiti oil refineries, and a liquefied natural gas facility in Qatar. Trump warned that Israel would not target that gas facility again and that he would authorize U.S. forces to decimate it if they attack Qatar again.
