After the cold thrill contained within US president Donald Trump’s message on Saturday confirming the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Sunday brought into sharper focus the immediate consequences for the Middle East. A barrage of continuing US and Israeli joint strikes were countered by retaliatory strikes from Iran across the Persian Gulf. The deaths of three US service members were also confirmed during what the Trump administration has named “Operation Epic Fury”.
It was becoming clear that radical reversal of policy in Trump’s foreign interventionism had thrust the Middle East, and potentially the United States, into a heightened chapter of uncertainty and chaos.
Word of those military deaths will reaffirm the visceral fear felt by many Americans of both political hues ever since the disastrous consequences of the country’s ill-fated intervention in Iraq two decades ago. The sophisticated military precision of the Saturday missile raids which killed 86-year-old Khamenei in his Tehran compound has been set against loudening questions over Trump’s broader strategy to facilitate an uprising by the Iranian people.
“We’ve seen this playbook before,” said Democratic senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona politician and retired combat pilot.
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“Weeks of inflated claims, selective facts and talk of imminent threats that led the American people into a war that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of taxpayer dollars . . . So, what’s the plan for what comes next? I don’t think Donald Trump knows the answer and that’s dangerous when American lives are on the line.”
Kelly added that when he launched his first combat mission in Operation Desert Storm, during the Gulf war 35 years ago, he “understood the mission and the end goal”, adding: “That’s the minimum level of leadership this country deserves. And Donald Trump has failed again at that.”
Within the US, initial responses to the strikes are a vivid blend of delight among Iranian exiles and a guarded welcome of the end of the Khamenei reign of domestic terror. It is tempered by Democratic criticism that the Trump administration again bypassed Congress in seeking approval for its decision. There is mystification as to what the long-term plan is – or there is one at all. Senior figures in Congress have called for a quick vote on a war powers resolution to restrain Trump from further strikes on Iran.
The decision to bring the country into what Trump has termed a “war” has been criticised by Republican outliers as the opposite to the Maga theme of “America First”. A forecast spike in oil prices to $100 a barrel will not help the administration’s argument it is bringing down prices for US consumers.
The immediate White House explanation – that the Iranians were on the brink of developing an artillery capable of threatening US soil – has been broadly disputed. Trump’s loose invitation to Iran’s citizens to “take back their country” has so far offered no US military or administrative directives as to how that might be achieved.
“The endgame is pretty clear- we need to stop the terror coming out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp. That terror will continue as long as that regime is in place,” countered Tim Sheehy, a Montana senator and military veteran, in a Sunday interview.
“The Iranian people have made clear that they are ready to take their country back. But they need help. My hope is that we are able to weaken the regime to the point where the Iranian people can rise up and once again build a government that represents their interest.”
Fragmented details of background, days and hours before Trump ordered the strikes, began to emerge over the weekend. Significantly, he gave scant mention of Iran during his marathon state-of-the-union address last Tuesday. It has been reported that several of Trump’s closest advisers, including vice-president JD Vance, general Dan Caine and senior Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, indicated their doubts about the likely success of air strikes.
But Israeli intelligence suggesting that Khamenei and Iran’s key commanders would be in the Tehran compound on Saturday corresponded with CIA information. That opportunity, combined with Trump’s stated conviction that the Khamenei regime would not agree to US demands that it surrender its nuclear capabilities, led to Trump authorising a ferocious barrage of air strikes, with a stunning outcome.
The US president limited his Sunday morning communications to a posted message stating: “I have just been informed that we have destroyed and sunk nine Iranian naval ships, some of them relatively large and important. We are going after the rest – they will soon be floating at the bottom of the sea, also.”
At least 201 people were reported to have been killed in the air strikes on Iran.
Even as the reeling Islamic regime set about naming interim leadership, it delivered ballistic missile strikes on US military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Israel Defence Forces announced it is mobilising 100,000 reservists.
At least 22 people were killed in Pakistan amid crowds denouncing the US-Israeli strikes, including 10 people during an attempt to storm the US consulate in Karachi. The chaos and bloodshed looked set to intensify in the days ahead.
