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Top congressional Democrats called on Donald Trump to justify his willingness to go to war with Iran after a classified briefing led them to believe the US was poised to launch a new attack.
The lawmakers did not disclose what they learnt in a briefing from US secretary of state Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday, but said the US president must urgently provide an explanation of his war aims to the American public.
“This is important and the administration needs to make its case to the American people,” said Chuck Schumer, the top Democratic senator.
Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said after the briefing that Trump needed to justify his position.
“The president made the representation that Iran’s nuclear programme was completely and totally obliterated last year as a result of actions that the administration had taken,” Jeffries said after the briefing.
“So if that, in fact, was true, what is the urgency as of this moment? That’s an open question, and the American people need a real explanation,” Jeffries said hours before Trump’s State of the Union address.
The briefing came as the US continued to increase its military assets in the region, adding two more guided-missile destroyers in recent days.
Trump has deployed a “vast armada” to the Middle East, in the largest naval build-up in the region since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
The assembled force now consists of 18 warships, including two aircraft carriers, 13 destroyers and three littoral combat ships. More destroyers are expected to be dispatched, said a person familiar with the matter.
The USS Gerald R Ford, Washington’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, was in port in Souda Bay, Crete, on Tuesday, according to satellite imagery. The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier was in the north Arabian Sea, according to the navy.
The US has also significantly increased its fighter jets in the region and added more Thaad and Patriot air defence systems, which the US used to defend its assets and its allies against an onslaught of Iranian ballistic and smaller missiles during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June.
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Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said he appreciated Tuesday’s “consultation” from the White House, but he said it was “incumbent upon the president to make the case of what our country’s goals are, what our country’s interests are and how we’re going to protect American interests in the region.”
“Maybe we’ll hear that tonight, but if we don’t hear it tonight, we need to hear it very, very, very soon,” he said.
US negotiators plan to resume talks with Iran in Geneva on Thursday, their third meeting in recent weeks. But Trump and his aides have increasingly expressed frustration with Tehran’s refusal to commit to halting all uranium enrichment, including for civil use. The US president has threatened “bad things” will happen to the Islamic republic if it fails to make a deal.
Fox News host Bret Baier on Tuesday wrote on X that the president had told him “Iran desperately wants a deal . . . but just can’t say the sacred phrase, ‘We won’t build a nuclear weapon.’”
Republican Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, told Fox & Friends earlier in the day that the US does not “have to make [Iran] an offer; our offer can be you meet our demands or we bomb you”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday repeated Trump’s claim that the US “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme in June when it joined Israel’s 12-day war with the Islamic republic but she said Tehran might try to reestablish that programme. “And that’s what the president wants to ensure can never happen again.”
Asked whether Iran poses a threat to the US now, Leavitt said: “Iran chants ‘Death to America.’ So, you tell me if that is a threat.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have largely rallied behind Trump’s policy priorities, said they trusted the president to do what was right.
The president’s war aims are “certainly a topic that is important”, said Republican senator Jerry Moran, who also sits on the Senate intelligence committee. Moran, who was not in Tuesday’s briefing, added he would prefer to hear that information in a “classified setting”. But “I don’t have a choice on when that happens,” he said.
It would be unprecedented for a US president to announce a major military campaign during his State of the Union address. But as Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert and former US peace negotiator at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: “That’s reason enough for Trump to do it.”
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