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“Israel launched airstrikes on Hezbollah-dominated areas in Beirut and southern Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah’s missile and drone attacks. The strikes, which killed at least 31 people, were in response to Hezbollah’s actions following the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The conflict has escalated, drawing Lebanon into the broader US-Israeli war with Iran.
Conflict spreads as militant group targets Israel over Ali Khamenei killing and IDF responds with Beirut strikes
Israel has carried out heavy airstrikes on the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut after the Iran-backed Lebanese group launched missiles and drones towards Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Residents of Beirut were woken by the sounds of about a dozen blasts at 3am as Israel struck three different locations in the south of Lebanon’s capital. Bombings continued into the late hours of the morning, with the area almost entirely deserted by the time of a strike at around noon.
The explosions rocked windows around the city and were heard from miles away. People heard warplanes and bombs being dropped as airstrikes were carried out over wide swathes of the south of the country, collapsing buildings in villages near Tyre.
At least 31 people were killed 149 injured in the strikes, in what Lebanon’s health ministry said was a preliminary toll.
People leave in their cars after Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs. Photograph: Ahmad Al Kerdi/Reuters
Lebanon is the latest country sucked into the US-Israeli war with Iran, which in its third day has expanded to much of the Middle East. Iran continued to attack Gulf Arab states, with a drone hitting an Aramco oil refinery in Saudi Arabia on Monday morning. Overnight, a drone hit a UK military base in Cyprus – the first time that Iranian strikes have affected an EU state.
The senior Iranian official Ali Larijani said Iran did not want to attack states in the region but that it would continue to target them as long as they hosted US bases that were being used for staging grounds for attacks against Iran.
The US president, Donald Trump, who announced the start of the war against Iran as an operation aimed at regime change, gave contradictory statements over whether or not there could be a diplomatic off-ramp to the conflict.
Initially telling the Atlantic on Sunday that he was “ready to talk”, he seemed to later harden his position and in a video released on his Truth Social platform he said the fighting would continue until all objectives were achieved, vowing to “avenge” US troops killed so far.
Larijani, in a brief post on X, said: “We will not negotiate with the United States.”
It is unclear how deep the involvement of Hezbollah will be in the Iran war, as the Lebanese state seeks to restrain it from further involving the country in the regional conflict.
Hezbollah said in a statement it had launched a barrage of missiles and drones at the Mishmar al-Karmel missile defence facility near Haifa at around midnight in “retaliation” for the killing of Khamenei and “in defence of Lebanon and its people”.
Israel responded just a few hours later, hitting what it described as Hezbollah targets across south Lebanon, the Bekaa valley and the Beirut suburb of Dahieh. The Israeli military claimed the strikes on Dahieh had killed several senior Hezbollah officers.
“Hezbollah opened a campaign against Israel overnight and is fully responsible for any escalation. Any enemy that threatens our security will pay a heavy price,” the chief of the Israeli military, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, said in a statement.
An Israeli military spokesperson issued evacuation orders for 55 different villages and towns across Lebanon, warning people to get at least a kilometre away as they were near “Hezbollah operatives and facilities”. Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military announced the deployment of 100,000 reservists, many of them along the border with Lebanon.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military, Lt Col Nadav Shoshani, said that thus far Israeli troops had not entered Lebanese territory, but were “prepared to do so” if necessary. The goal of the campaign was to “degrade the capabilities of the group”.
Streams of people began to flee Dahieh by car and by foot, and lines of cars began to form outside petrol stations in the southern city of Tyre as residents began to head northwards. The highways from Dahieh into the centre of the capital were gridlocked with scooters and cars driving over rubble and debris from the earlier strikes. In the south, people drove northwards on both sides of the highway.
Cars sit in traffic as residents flee Israeli airstrikes in Dahieh Photograph: Bilal Hussein/AP
Videos showed the tops of buildings in Dahieh engulfed in flames, while burnt out husks of cars lay at the feet of the crumpled buildings. As they scrambled to flee, witnesses reported seeing rocket barrages flying from south Lebanon towards Israel, in what seemed to be Hezbollah artillery volleys.
The memory of the 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah that ended in 2024 loomed large in the minds of Lebanese. Fears spread quickly that Dahieh, the Bekaa valley and large parts of the south could be rendered uninhabitable as it was then. Israeli bombed those areas daily during the war and nearly 4,000 people were killed and a million displaced.
In the early hours of Monday, families and friends quickly devised plans for what they should do and tried to understand what exactly was happening, as the number of displaced people from affected areas in Lebanon grew.
Dozens of schools in the capital opened their doors to shelter the displaced families, while crowds of people sat in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut.
Lebanon’s government quickly condemned Hezbollah’s decision to bomb Israel without consulting the state. Without naming the militant group by name, the Lebanese prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said he would “not allow the country to be dragged into new adventures”.
“The rocket fire from southern Lebanon is an irresponsible and suspicious act that jeopardises Lebanon’s security and safety and provides Israel with pretexts to continue its aggression,” Salam said in a post on X.
For weeks, Lebanese officials had scrambled to prevent Hezbollah from joining any potential war in Iran, as Israel passed messages to its Lebanese counterparts that any attack would draw a wide-ranging response against the entire country.“
"There's no four-dimensional chess here. There's just the president, and what we know he's like.
This is an adapted excerpt from MS Now’s Feb. 28 special coverage.
Early Saturday morning, the United States started a war with Iran for some reason. Your guess is as good as anyone’s as to why the president of the United States did this.
In terms of pure rational deduction about what he’s doing here, we can rule out all the reasons he has said he is doing it.
Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not. The United States is very far from Iran. One might even say it’s a whole continent away, which means a missile launched from there to hit us here would have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Does Iran have intercontinental ballistic missiles? No, it does not. And there is no known evidence, or even serious allegation, that it’s anywhere near developing one anytime soon. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently admitted that the threat is only that maybe one day Iran might have that kind of capability. One day. Just like you or I might one day learn to fly! Or to time travel!
This isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice ayatollah who’s going to step in to take over the top job.
Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment? That’s what the president’s diminutive real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, asserted this week when asked about the Iran talks he’s inexplicably part of on behalf of the United States, despite his only relevant experience and training being that he is an old real estate friend of the president. But no, Iran is not. Not only has there been no American or international evidence or intelligence made public that Iran is doing that, but even the Trump administration says it’s not happening. Rubio, at a press conference in Saint Kitts and Nevis on Wednesday, told reporters, “They’re not enriching right now.”
Have we just started a war with Iran because they’ve got some advanced nuclear program that’s rushing toward a bomb? Ask President Donald Trump, who insists that the last time he ordered the bombing of Iran, it “totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear program. So it’s hard to say that anything “totally obliterated” — gone, pulverized, erased from the Earth — is now suddenly there again, and so a war must start.
So it’s not that they’re gonna get us with ballistic missiles. It’s not that they’re enriching uranium, and we don’t like that. It’s not their nuclear program, which Trump says he obliterated.
The president has said a couple of times in recent days that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they’re not pursuing a nuclear bomb. The Iranian government, actually, has said that over and over again; they’ll say it whenever you like. So that does not appear to be the reason either.
So why has the president just started a war with Iran?
Is it because his heart bleeds, empathetically, on a human level, for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government in January and February? Is it because Trump really feels for those people, and that his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech, the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government, and not face violence because of it? Is that what you think? If so, good morning, hope you’ve slept well for this past decade in which you’ve been dead to the world.
But suspend disbelief for a moment.
Just suppose that the reason the United States of America has just started a war with Iran is because — as the president said in his weird prerecorded video message early Saturday morning — he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their government.
And maybe they will. Maybe they will try?
But Iran is a huge country. It’s 92 million people. It’s more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started disastrous regime change wars with those countries two decades ago.
Iran has regular military forces, but it also has a huge Revolutionary Guard force that has, effectively, its own army, navy, intelligence service and special forces. It plays a huge role in the massive, suffocating domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best of times, and to massacre the Iranian people in the worst times. They have massive economic interests. They have a huge hold on multiple sectors of the Iranian economy. And, to state the obvious, they are not the kind of force that’s going to go poof when Trump’s airstrikes manage to kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian state media reported Sunday morning local time that the supreme leader has been killed.
But this isn’t Venezuela. There’s no vice ayatollah who’s going to step in to take over the top job.
If you voted for Donald Trump because you believed the hype that he was “America first,” that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change wars… well, again, good morning, hope you slept well. But the president, in this case, says explicitly that this is a war we’re waging for regime change.
After the now-slain leader, Khamenei, who’s been in place since 1989, there’s no other person of that stature to just pop in place and say it’s done. And so if you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government — to organize very quickly into a new populist political force to rise up against, among other things, the security services there that have been massacring them by the thousands — you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate.
When you, Donald Trump, in your baseball hat, proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which Trump did not.
You might have taken steps to turn the internet back on in Iran so the people there could reach each other and the world, and so the world could reach them too.
If this is a regime change war that Trump is seriously hoping the Iranian people will complete for him, there has been no serious or even unserious effort by the United States to make it possible for any uprising by the Iranian people to succeed.
And so why is this happening?
Well, cui bono? — who benefits?
It’s always useful to start with that question. In any country.
Who wants Iran bombed off the map, for their own reasons? Who are their rivals and enemies? Perennially, the Gulf Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
You know, Qatar. The country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400-milion-dollar plane, a gilded flying palace for his own use both during his presidency and after?
With this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over again that the easiest answer is the truest one.
And you remember the Saudis who stuffed $2 billion into the pockets of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, just as Trump’s first term in office came to a close? Enough people were alarmed about that they actually bothered to come up with an excuse for what made it OK. They said, don’t worry, Jared will never again work for the U.S. government; he’s never coming back to Washington, so we’ll never have to worry about having someone involved in U.S. policy who has also been given billions of dollars by Saudi Arabia.
Well, who was leading the negotiations on behalf of the United States with Iran before we just started this war with them? I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Saint Kitts and Nevis. It wasn’t him. It was Jared Kushner, who was recently paid billions of dollars by Iran’s chief rival, sitting alongside Trump’s tiny real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, whose son recently sought to improve his family fortunes by going to Qatar to seek money from its sovereign wealth fund.
So it’s like if you were having a backyard dispute with your neighbor: “Hey, your new fence crosses into my property line; hey, that tree you just cut down was mine!” You’re having a neighborly dispute, and then the cops show up. And the cops break down your door with a battering ram, they arrest your whole family, ransack your house, and then bulldoze it. They tell your neighbor, “Hey, it’s done, you can take his whole back yard, you can take his house now.”
And as you’re trying to figure out why this has just happened, you come to learn that your neighbor has been paying huge bribes to the police in your town.
There’s lots of attention on Israel, and indeed Israel and the U.S. worked together in the bombing campaign against Iran in June, and again in this new war that started Saturday. But it is the Gulf Arab states who are all against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival. It’s those countries that have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years, and particularly in recent months.
And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.
Why did Donald Trump just start a war with Iran? You tell me.
It’s not that they have ballistic missiles that can reach us. It’s not that they have achieved some kind of breakthrough in nuclear enrichment. It’s not that they have or are about to have a nuclear bomb. It’s not about somehow supporting the Iranian people — or we’d be actually supporting the Iranian people.
Maybe it’s for oil, as the president daydreams himself into another 19th-century war fantasy of conquering foreign lands he doesn’t care about but would like to rob of their natural resources. Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire helmed by an American emperor.
Maybe.
But as this now becomes the seventh country he’s bombed since being back in office for one year, cui bono? — who benefits? — seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer.
With this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over again that the easiest answer is the truest one. There’s no four-dimensional chess here. There’s just him, and what we know he’s like.
This president appears to have grown his enormous and excited new appetite for military intervention during this term in office just because he thinks war is easy and exciting.
It earns him not only close attention but even occasionally plaudits from Very Serious People who are professionally inclined to believe that there’s some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war.
It gets him a ton of attention. He gets to do it unilaterally — naturally, there’s no question that he would seek a declaration of war from Congress or even an authorization for the use of military force. It’s something he gets to do on his own say so in a baseball hat from home. It’s exciting, it’s controversial, it’s all about him, and — not for nothing — it’s the world’s greatest change of subject.
The airstrikes were launched on Saturday, a weekday and a school day in Iran. The internet’s off there. The government hasn’t advised its own people what to do, as American airstrikes hit multiple cities.
Donald Trump, as a private citizen, repeatedly said — in 2011, in 2012 and in 2013 — that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects, in order to get re-elected.
Trump was wrong about that. Obama didn’t start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should do it. He said so. He said it would get Obama re-elected. We know what Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U.S. president starting a war with Iran.
And now, facing domestic political disaster in this year’s elections, he’s done it himself."
"A battle of wills betweenAnthropicand Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth concluded Friday with the artificial intelligence company effectively banned from all federal government systems. It was something of a deus ex machina, courtesy of President Donald Trump, to a moral standoff over how the Pentagon could use Anthropic model, Claude. Hegseth’s hardline stance — and Trump’s dudgeon over being challenged — showcase how right CEO Dario Amodei was to try to put (some) limits on the way his company’s technology was deployed.
Anthropic first won amajor $200 million contractwith the Defense Department last year, granting access to the company’s AI models and allowing them to be deployed on work involving classified material. But Anthropic, which was founded over concerns about the lack of safeguards at other AI startups like OpenAI, is one of the few companies in the AI space calling formorefederal regulation over the emerging technology. It’s telling then thatOpenAI swooped insoon after Anthropic’s unceremonious dumping to fill the vacuum, despite pledging to (somehow) prevent the Pentagon from abusing its technology.
Amodei soon found himself defending his company from claims that it isbuilding “woke AI,”as White House AI czar David Sacks put it last year, and at odds with an executive order demanding that AI models used by the federal government be “free from ideological bias.” But the tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic really exploded after Amodeipublished an essay in Januarylisting his concerns about how AI could be used by governments:
‘There need to be limits to what we allow our governments to do with AI, so that they don’t seize power or repress their own people. The formulation I have come up with is that we should use AI for national defense in all ways except those which would make usmore like our autocratic adversaries.’
In brief, Amodei named two major redlines for Claude’s use: conducting mass surveillance domestically and developing autonomous weapons — or weapons that don’t need a human to operate them. The Pentagon says it doesn’t intend to do either of those things — but also won’t let someone else say that it can’t. Defense officials have said thatAnthropic must instead acceptthat its services can be used “for all lawful purposes” regardless of what the terms and conditions of its contract say. Hegseth likewise saidlast month at SpaceX headquartersthat the Pentagon will not “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.”
Theextremely heated rhetoricfrom the Pentagon toward Anthropic over the past week was well outside the norm. Hegsethwarned Amodei in a meeting Tuesdaythat without granting carte blanche access to Claude, that the administration couldinvoke the Defense Production Actor label the company a “supply-chain risk” on par with foreign companies. Both are wild threats to make against an American company, particularly one already integrated into the DOD’s systems. And Amodei rightlypointed out in a statementThursday that the two threats are “are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.”
Despite Hegseth’s warnings, Amodei concluded in his statement, “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” However,before Hegseth’s 5 p.m. Friday deadline could be hit, Trumpcame out on Truth Socialto declare that over the next six months, every federal agency will immediately cease use of Anthropic’s technology. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump wrote, calling Anthropic an “out-of-control, Radical Left AI company.”
Hegseth soon thereafter made good on his promise,writing on Xthat he’d instructed his department to name the company a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” effectively making it persona non grata for the Defense Department and its suppliers.
The Pentagon’s inability to accept constraints isn’t necessarily unique to Trump or Hegseth. The defense community has pushed back hard against anything seen as a constraint on potential actions under GOP and Democratic administrations alike. History is littered with examples, from America’s refusal tojoin the International Criminal Courttorejecting the international treaty banning land mines. Whether the Pentagon intends to use Claude in the ways Anthropic rejects is in many ways secondary to the idea that the military would accept guardrails on its actions from outside the chain of command.
At the same time, calling out Hegseth and the Pentagon is not intended to be a sweeping defense of Anthropic or Claude’s generative AI model, much less the AI industry writ large. Let’s not forget that it was only recently that Anthropicsoftened its own internal safeguardson responsibly scaling up its models in order to better compete with other companies.
Meanwhile, the redlines set by Amodei sound weighty, but still allow the company’s AI to be deployed in any number of potentially lethal ways. One hypothetical example: sifting through reams of surveillance data to determine targets for the military strikes against alleged drug boats off the coast of South America. Whether any profile generated on the targets of these signature strikes is accurate isn’t at issue here — only whether a human drone operator is the one to pull the trigger.
Given the competition’s amoral mindset toward products that have the potential to cause massive harm, the bar for assessing Anthropic’s self-regulation is so low as to truly be in hell. It means the Trumpist charges that Claude is somehow “woke AI” are both an overblown attack and an unearned badge of honor.
As with almost every major technological leap, America’s laws are deeply lagging when it comes to policing the rapid growth of AI. Without real safeguards and regulations, there’s little stopping the Pentagon from blacklisting a company that dares draw the line at having Americans’ data siphoned up rather than foreigners’, or at having a robot being the one pulling the trigger."
"The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstandingvalues. It is separate from the newsroom.
This article has been updated to reflect the latest news.
In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised voters that he would end wars, not start them. Over the past year, he has instead ordered military strikes in seven nations. His appetite for military intervention grows with the eating.
Now he has ordered a new attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran, in cooperation with Israel, and it is much more extensive than the targeted bombing of nuclear facilities in June. Yet he started this war without explaining to the American people and the world why he was doing so. Nor has he involved Congress, which the Constitution grants the sole power to declare war. He insteadposted a video at 2:30 a.m. Easternon Saturday, shortly after bombing began, in which he said that Iran presented “imminent threats” and called for the overthrow of its government. His rationaleis dubious, and making his case by video in the middle of the night is unacceptable.
Among his justifications is the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program, which is a worthy goal. But Mr. Trump declared that program “obliterated” by the strike in June, a claim belied by both U.S. intelligence and this new attack. The contradiction underscores how little regard he has for his duty to tell the truth when committing American armed forces to battle. It also shows how little faith American citizens should place in his assurances about the goals and results of his growing list of military adventures.
Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran is reckless. His goals are ill-defined. He has failed to line up the international and domestic support that would be necessary to maximize the chances of a successful outcome. He has disregarded both domestic and international law for warfare.
The Iranian regime,to be clear, deserves no sympathy. Nobody should mourn the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who wasreportedly killed in the attack.
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The regimehas wrought miserysince its revolution 47 years ago — on its own people, on its neighbors and around the world. Itmassacredthousands of protesters this year. It imprisons and executes political dissidents. It oppresses women, L.G.B.T.Q. people and religious minorities. Its leaders have impoverished their own citizens while corruptly enriching themselves. They have proclaimed “Death to America” since coming to power and killed hundreds of U.S. service members in the region, as well as bankrolled terrorism that has killed civilians in the Middle East and as far away as Argentina.
Iran’s government presents a distinct threat because it combines this murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions. Iran has repeatedly defied international inspectors over the years. Since the June attack, the government has shown signs ofrestarting its pursuitof nuclear weapons technology. American presidents of both parties have rightly made a commitment to prevent Tehran from getting a bomb.
We recognize that fulfilling this commitment could justify military action at some point. For one thing, the consequences of allowing Iran to follow the path of North Korea — and acquire nuclear weapons after years ofexploiting international patience— are too great. For another, the costs of confronting Iran over its nuclear program look less imposing than they once did.
Iran, as David Sanger of The Timesrecently explained, “is going through a period of remarkable military, economic and political weakness.” Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Israel has reduced the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah (two of Iran’s terrorist proxies), attacked Iran directly and, with help from allies, mostly repelled its response. The new recognition of Iran’s limitations helped give rebels in Syria the confidence to march on Damascus and oust the horrific Assad regime, a longtime Iranian ally. Iran’s governmentdid almost nothingto intervene. This recent history demonstrates that military action, for all its awful costs, can have positive consequences.
A responsible American president could make a plausible argument for further action against Iran. The core of this argument would need to be a clear explanation of the strategy, as well as the justification for attacking now, even though Irandoes not appear closeto having a nuclear weapon. This strategy would involve a promise to seek approval from Congress and to collaborate with international allies.
Mr. Trump is not even attempting this approach. He is telling the American people and the world that he expects their blind trust. He has not earned that trust.
He instead treats allies with disdain. He lies constantly, including about the results of the June attack on Iran. He has failed to live up to his own promises for solving other crises in Ukraine, Gaza and Venezuela. He hasfired senior military leadersfor failing to show fealty to his political whims. When his appointees make outrageous mistakes — such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethsharing advanced detailsof a military attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group, on an unsecured group chat — Mr. Trump shields them from accountability. His administration appears to have violated international law by, among other things,disguising a military plane as a civilian planeandshooting two defenseless sailors who survived an initial attack.
A responsible approach would also involve a detailed conversation with the American people about the risks. Iranremains a heavily militarized country. Its medium-range missiles may have failed to do much damage to Israel last year, but it maintains many short-range missiles that could overwhelm any defense system and hit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other nearby countries. Mr. Trump did acknowledge this in his overnight video, saying, “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties.”
He should have had the courage to say so in hisState of the Union address on Tuesday, among other settings. When a president asks American troops and diplomats to risk their lives, he should not be coy about it.
Recognizing Mr. Trump’sirresponsibility,some members of Congress have taken steps to constrain him on Iran. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, and Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, haveproposed a resolutionmeant to prevent Mr. Trump from starting a war without congressional approval. The resolution makes clear that Congress has not authorized an attack on Iran and demands the withdrawal of American troops within 60 days. Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, are sponsoring a similar measure in their chamber. The start of hostilities should not dissuade legislators from passing these bills. A robust assertion of authority by Congress is the best way to constrain the president.
Mr. Trump’s failure to articulate a strategy for this attack has created shocking levels of uncertainty about it. The attack has succeeded in killing a brutal dictator, but it remains unclear what comes next. Mr. Trump hasoffered no senseof why the world should expect this regime change to end better than the versions in Iraq and Afghanistan at the start of this century. Those wars toppled governments but understandably soured the American public on open-ended military operations of uncertain national interest, and theyembittered the troopswho loyally served in them.
Now that the military operation is underway, we wish above all for the safety of the American troops charged with conducting it and for the well-being of the many innocent Iranians who have long suffered under their brutal government. We lament that Mr. Trump is not treating war as the grave matter that it is.
The Times is committed to publishinga diversity of lettersto the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are sometips. And here’s our email:letters@nytimes.com.
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom."
