The lack of detail or clear plan beyond the air campaign has sparked mounting criticism in Congress. Most Republicans have publicly thrown their support behind Trump, but Democrats have argued the president doesn’t have a defined strategy and have warned the US could get pulled into a protracted conflict.
“The Trump administration still has not given any detail on where Iran’s nuclear programme was at,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told NPR earlier on Monday.
“We have not seen any specific intelligence, so I don’t think there’s any credible claim that there was an imminent threat coming from Iran, which is not to say Iran isn’t a problem,” he added.
General David Petraeus, a former director of the CIA, told the BBC that the killing of Iran’s supreme leader was a “historic achievement”. But he warned that urging the Iranian people to rise up is risky.
“Unfortunately, in most cases like this it is the guys who have the most guns and the most thugs and who are willing to be most brutal who prevail,” he said.
The regime’s security forces, he added, are about a million-strong and have already shown they are willing to kill their own people.
But the retired general, who is also a former commander of US forces in Iraq, said he did not think Trump would put US boots on the ground in Iran to achieve his objectives.
“No, the president has clearly said that won’t be the case – the vice-president has echoed that. And in a way I think they’re trying to pre-emptively reassure the American people there won’t be another long, tough, hard war such as we had in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.