But now we learn that much more appears to have been going on. That’s one key takeaway from this blockbuster scoop in The Post:
On the day the U.S. military killed a top Iranian commander in Baghdad, U.S. forces carried out another top secret mission against a senior Iranian military official in Yemen, according to U.S. officials.The strike targeting Abdul Reza Shahlai, a financier and key commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force who has been active in Yemen, did not result in his death, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the matter.The unsuccessful operation may indicate that the Trump administration’s killing of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani last week was part of a broader operation than previously explained, raising questions about whether the mission was designed to cripple the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or solely to prevent an imminent attack on Americans as originally stated.The attempt to take out Shahlai simultaneously with Soleimani suggests that this wasn’t an isolated, defensive operation but may have been part of a broader attack on the Quds Force.
Shahlai is operating in Yemen, meaning the conflict he is waging at the moment is less against the United States than against Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a war in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels with our support.
In recent statements, administration officials have noted Shahlai’s role in a 2007 attack on American soldiers in Iraq, his support of Houthi rebels in Yemen and his “long history of involvement in attacks targeting the U.S. and our allies.”
But if someone like Shahlai was planning to attack American forces — let’s say “imminently” — Yemen wouldn’t be the place to do it. Which suggests this may have been part of a broader operation to kill Iranian military leaders.
Democrats sound the alarm
In an interview, Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told us there’s “no doubt” in his mind that the assassination of Soleimani and the effort to target Shahlai are part of a wider effort that’s mostly being concealed from Congress.
“The more you hear, the more you realize that you’ve been fed a bunch of untruths,” Engel told us. “Was Shahlai an imminent threat? I think not.”
Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, added that this news badly complicates the rationale offered for the Soleimani killing.
“This does make it harder for the administration to argue that the operations were solely designed to eliminate somebody who was plotting attacks on Americans,” Malinowski, a former State Department official, told us.
Malinowski also said this new report means Congress will have to orient itself toward asking broader and deeper questions about the administration’s secret military operations.
“If the objective was to weaken the Quds Force irrespective of any intelligence about imminent attacks on Americans, then where does that end?” Malinowski said. “And is it over?”
You’d think Congress could bring in administration officials to answer these questions. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been invited to testify next week to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
But Engel told us that Pompeo has not said whether he’ll appear. “Right now it looks like he’s not coming,” Engel told us. “We haven’t heard from him.”
If so, perhaps this is because Pompeo has not been faring well lately when asked tough questions about all this.
On Thursday, he seemed to undercut the administration’s public story by telling Fox News the following about the threats Soleimani posed: “We don’t know precisely when and we don’t know precisely where, but it was real.”
Pompeo has also been struggling to clean up after Trump’s public statements. In extemporaneous remarks Thursday, Trump said Soleimani was about to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — the first time it had been suggested by anyone.
That led Pompeo to tell reporters on Friday: “Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad.”
Numerous Democratic senators are now saying that the threat to embassies was not part of the briefing given to members of Congress on Wednesday.
Which raises the possibility that it’s not actually true, but once the president said it, his national security team felt obligated to back him up.
All of which underscores the urgency of bringing in Pompeo. Will he show up? Who knows?
You’d think these new revelations would make it much harder for Republicans to resist asserting congressional authority over Trump’s war powers. The House has passed a measure requiring Trump to seek congressional authorization for future hostilities against Iran, and the Senate is set to vote on a companion version next week.
The latest news “creates an additional reason for the Senate to follow suit,” Malinowski said, because “if the strategy goes beyond protecting Americans from imminent attack, it could include further strikes.”
If Congress were to assert its authority, it could use the ensuing debate over any future actions to probe more deeply into all the questions that remain unanswered.
It’s hard to imagine that four GOP senators — which is all the war powers measure would need to pass — would not be willing to assert congressional authority, given this latest news and all it indicates about how much we do not know about what the administration is secretly up to.
Democrats Press for Details on Suleimani Strike, but Trump Administration Gives Few
Administration officials argue that the general was plotting imminent attacks, but Democrats said that the intelligence they have seen was too vague.
WASHINGTON — Under increasing pressure to defend the killing of a top Iranian general in Iraq, senior Trump administration officials offered new justifications but little detail on Tuesday, citing threats to the American Embassy in Baghdad and intelligence suggesting other imminent attacks that helped prompt the strike.
Democrats stepped up their criticism of intelligence that the administration provided immediately after the drone strike last week that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The administration’s formal notification to Congress, which remains classified, provided no information on future threats or the imminent attack, officials who have read it said.
Several said it was improperly classified, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called it “vague and unacceptably unspecific.” Lawmakers pressed for more answers on Tuesday at a briefing by the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, and other intelligence officials.
Iranian forces or their proxies were days from attacking American personnel when President Trump decided to strike General Suleimani, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper told reporters at the Pentagon. Mr. Esper added that General Suleimani had traveled to Baghdad to coordinate attacks following up on a two-day siege of the United States Embassy there last week by pro-Iranian demonstrators. He declined to elaborate but called the intelligence “exquisite.”
Mr. Trump was more forceful but no more specific. General Suleimani “was planning a very big attack and a very bad attack for us and other people,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “And we stopped him.”
Their defense of the killing came as Tehran launched its initial response, firing a dozen ballistic missiles early Wednesday from Iranian territory targeting American forces in Iraq’s Anbar Province and Kurdish region. A Pentagon official confirmed that the missiles were launched at bases hosting American forces, but provided no initial damage assessment.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered a direct and proportional response to the Suleimani killing, not the kind of covert action through proxy forces that Tehran has traditionally employed. American officials in recent weeks warned about the threat from short-range ballistic missiles that Iran had smuggled into Iraq.
As the threats from Tehran increased, several NATO allies conducting training for Iraqi troops — including Canada, Germany and Croatia — decided at least temporarily to remove some troops from Iraq. Canada, which leads the NATO training mission, announced it was withdrawing its 500 troops and sending them to Kuwait.
Fueled by what they have called weak and inadequate briefings from the administration, Democrats grew increasingly vocal in their skepticism, arguing the administration has a high burden to meet to show that the strike was justified.
Some drew comparisons to the flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recent revelations about the failures of the war in Afghanistan.
“Between no weapons of mass destruction, no clear and present danger, the Afghanistan papers — there’s plenty to be skeptical about,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a brief interview. “The burden is on the administration to prove the truthfulness and veracity of how they made their decision.”
Ms. Haspel has spoken with multiple lawmakers in recent days, some of whom have urged her to be more forthcoming about the intelligence behind the killing. Ms. Haspel, in turn, has emphasized that she had serious concerns about the threat posed by General Suleimani if the administration held off on targeting him.
Before the drone strike that killed the general, the pro-Iranian protesters had attacked barricades outside the American Embassy in Baghdad, and American officials feared the attacks could resume and the situation could easily grow more dangerous, threatening the diplomats and military personnel who work at the compound.
General Suleimani had arrived in Baghdad to pressure the Iraqi government to kick out American forces after attacks by the United States on Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia group with ties to Iran, according to American officials.
One official noted that General Suleimani was traveling with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi who helps lead the Iranian-backed militias and who was coordinating the attacks on the American Embassy. Mr. al-Muhandis was also killed in the strike.
Additionally, the classified document sent to Capitol Hill only recounts the attacks that Iran and its proxies have carried out in recent months and weeks rather than outlining new threats, according to three American officials.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. demanded that Mr. Trump give a “sober-minded explanation” of the strike, its consequences and the intelligence that prompted it.
“All we’ve heard from this administration are shifting explanations, evasive answers, repeated assertions of an imminent threat without the necessary evidence to support that conclusion,” Mr. Biden, a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said in remarks from Pier 59 in New York. If there was a threat, he added, “we’re owed an explanation and the facts to back it up.”
Iranian-supported militias have increasingly directed attacks at Iraqi bases with American forces over the past two months, officials have said. Since May, intelligence and military officials have warned that Iran has been preparing for attacks against Americans in the Middle East.
The reports have prompted the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to relocate officers out of the American Embassy in Baghdad in recent days and weeks, though some C.I.A. officers were relocated earlier, according to officials briefed on the matter. Some went to other parts of Iraq, and officials emphasized that the moves had not diminished intelligence collection on Iranian activity in the country.
“We’re all going to want to hear why they thought targeting Suleimani was the best option, what were the other targets on the table, did they know about the collateral damage?” he said.
Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has long vocally opposed the lengthy deployments of American forces overseas, has emerged as one of the few Republicans willing to criticize the decision. He questioned the administration’s claim of an imminent attack, citing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s repeated criticism of General Suleimani.
“I’ve always been surprised at how presidents in general, including President Obama, stretch the idea of what imminence is,” Mr. Paul said. “I can tell you the secretary of state’s been talking about for over a year all the things Suleimani has done. I think they found this as an opportune time to take him out.”
Mr. Pompeo has led the administration’s defense of the strike and said on Tuesday that the intelligence was presented to Mr. Trump in broad detail before he ordered the strike.“It was the right decision,” Mr. Pompeo said.
And Robert C. O’Brien, the national security adviser, said that General Suleimani was plotting attacks on “diplomats, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” at multiple facilities.
Mr. O’Brien said the intelligence would most likely remain classified to avoid putting sources of intelligence and collection methods at risk. But, he added, “I can tell you that the evidence was strong.”
With the exception of Mr. Paul, most Republicans on Capitol Hill have coalesced around the administration.
“We had very clear, very solid information from the intelligence community that indeed there were going to be imminent attacks that could involve hundreds of people, could involve even thousands of people,” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters late last week, calling the intelligence “rock solid.”
The House was set this week to consider measures to curtail the president’s war-making powers on Iran by invoking the War Powers Resolution. A similar measure could come to a vote on the Senate floor as early as next week. And the Democratic-led House Foreign Affairs Committee announced a hearing set for next Tuesday on the Trump administration’s Iran policy.