by John Bolton;
The next day, in a Time magazine interview, Trump described the initial and most recent attacks as “very minor.”39 I wondered why I bothered coming to the West Wing every morning. This practically invited something more serious. Just as a starter on Wednesday, rockets were fired in Basra, likely by Shia militia groups, aimed at the local headquarters of three foreign oil companies (Exxon, Shell, and Eni), causing several injuries but no fatalities.40 The response of the Iraqi government was to announce a ban on attacks from its territory against foreign states.41 It would have been nice if Iraq treated Iranian military forces and Shia surrogates on its territory at least equally to the US, but that was impossible given Iran’s dominance in Baghdad. We refused to acknowledge this reality, even as it continued to expand, as it had been doing for several years. And a DC that morning produced no interest in responding to the rocket attacks. The IRGC’s new commander, Hossein Salami, and its Quds Force commander, Qassim Soleimani, had to be smiling broadly.
* * *
The bigger news that day was that Shanahan withdrew his nomination to be Secretary of Defense. Reports of past family turmoil caused by his former wife had resurfaced, which he did not want sensationalized in his confirmation hearings. It was a great tragedy, but one couldn’t begrudge his desire to shield his family from more unhappiness. Trump decided almost immediately to nominate Army Secretary Mark Esper (a West Point classmate of Pompeo’s) for the job, calling him immediately from the Oval. Back in my office, I called Esper myself to say congratulations and to get started on his formal nomination. The next day, Esper came to the White House in the late afternoon for pictures with Trump, and we talked beforehand about the current Iran crisis while waiting for the meeting and pictures.
Afterward, Esper and I walked back to my office, where he got a call that a Saudi desalinization plant’s power station had been hit by a Houthi missile. Esper departed immediately for the Pentagon, and I called Dunford, who had not yet heard of the attack. I walked to the Oval at 6:20 p.m. to tell Trump, and he asked if we should meet immediately to consider what to do. I was worried this report might be mistaken or overstated, so I said we should wait until Thursday morning to consider what to do.42 I called Dunford and filled in Pompeo, telling them both that we would caucus the next morning.
While this strike against the Shuqaiq desalinization plant seemed like a big deal at the time, a much bigger deal was the Sit Room’s call that night around nine thirty that Iran had shot down another US drone, the second one in less than two weeks, this one an RQ-4A Global Hawk, over the Strait of Hormuz. The weekly breakfast with Shanahan and Pompeo was already scheduled for Thursday morning, and Esper and Dunford had been added after the attack on the desalinization plant, so we were already ready to confer. We convened the next morning, June 20, at seven a.m. in the Ward Room. Dunford reported first that, at the request of the Saudis, Central Command Commander Frank McKenzie had a team heading to the Shuqaiq plant to assess the damage and identify what weapons had hit the facility (which, as with many such Saudi plants, also served as a power-generation station). We agreed a Central Command officer should give a public briefing as soon as possible in order to get the word out widely.
Far more important was Dunford’s reaction to the downing of the Global Hawk. He characterized that incident, which resulted in the destruction of a US asset variously estimated in the media to cost between $120 and $150 million,43 as “qualitatively different” from the others in the long list of attacks and provocations over the past several months, in response to which we had done nothing. Dunford was completely convinced the remotely piloted surveillance aircraft had always been in international airspace, although it likely flew through a zone Iran unilaterally designated as over its waters, which only Iran recognized. Dunford suggested we hit three sites along Iran’s coast. These three sites, while probably not themselves involved in downing the Global Hawk, were nonetheless commensurable.44 One of his key points was that he thought this response “proportional” and “non-escalatory.” Precisely because I thought we needed a significantly greater response to reestablish deterrence, I suggested we add other elements from options lists discussed earlier with Trump after the tanker attacks. We went back and forth for some time, and it was clear all of us thought we should retaliate for the attack, although Pompeo and I argued for a stronger response than Dunford and Shanahan. Esper, new to the issue, was largely silent. Ultimately, we compromised on destroying the three sites and several other measures. I said I wanted to be sure we were all in agreement, so I could tell Trump his advisors would present a unanimous recommendation. This was a good thing for the President. While he obviously had the final decision, no one could say he had come down too hard or too soft on Iran if he chose our package. Nor would there be an opportunity for the media’s favorite pastime of exposing conflict among his advisors. Subsequent press reports, quoting only anonymous sources, asserted that Dunford did not concur with Trump’s decision.45 That is simply not true. Dunford and everyone else at the breakfast agreed.
As we were talking, Trump decided he wanted to meet congressional leaders—there was a meeting with them scheduled for later that afternoon—before making a final decision. I called him immediately upon leaving the breakfast to explain our conversation and said his senior advisors had agreed on a response, and that we thought our unanimity would be helpful to him. Trump instantly agreed, and I had the distinct sense he knew he had to do something in response to the Global Hawk’s destruction. This was too much to accept without a military response. His tweet before the NSC meeting was clear: “Iran made a very big mistake!” Mulvaney later said he also thought Trump would act and wanted the Hill briefing to provide political cover for whatever he decided to do.
The NSC meeting actually began on time at eleven a.m., showing even Trump took this seriously. Pence, Esper, Shanahan, Dunford, Pompeo, Haspel, Mulvaney, Cipollone, Eisenberg, and I attended. With so many NSC meetings and other conversations among the key people in the weeks beforehand, the issues were hardly novel or lacking substantial foundations of prior consideration and discussion. I introduced the issues facing us, and then asked Dunford to explain what had happened to the Global Hawk.46 He said that our unmanned vehicle cost $146 million;47 it had been flying throughout its mission in international air space, including when it was shot down; and we knew the location of the battery that had launched the missile that destroyed it, based on calculations and experience analogous to airplane crash investigations.48 Dunford then presented the proposal we had agreed upon at breakfast, namely to hit three other sites and the other measures. The rest of us who attended the breakfast said we agreed with Dunford. Eisenberg said he wanted “to look at it” but expressed no reservation there might be any legal issues. He in no way, shape, or form asked what the level of casualties might be from these strikes. Trump asked if the sites were Russian, and how expensive they were, and Dunford assured him they were Russian made but not as expensive as our drone.49 We discussed whether there might be Russian casualties, which was doubtful but not impossible. Dunford said the attacks would be in the dead of night, so that the number of people manning the site would be small, although he did not give a precise number. Nor was he asked to by anyone present.
It was clear to me from Trump’s manner that he wanted to hit more than what we suggested. When he asked about this possibility in various ways, I said, “We can do it all at once, we can do it in pieces, we can do it as you like,” just so Trump understood we couldn’t foreclose his looking at other options by presenting an agreed-upon recommendation. Restoring US credibility, and our utterly negligible deterrence against a nuclear-weapons-aspiring, theocratic-militarist rogue state, would have justified a lot more, but I didn’t feel I needed to make that argument. I was certain Trump would at least approve the agreed-upon package from breakfast. Dunford opposed anything other than the breakfast idea, although he was very confident of success against that package, as we all were. The discussion went on, although Pompe
o sat mostly silent. “Bolton as a moderate,” Trump said at one point, because I was supporting the breakfast package, and everyone laughed. Turning to the question of financing, I said, “This will be a profit-making operation,” and Pompeo again described his encouraging fund-raising efforts to date, in which he was also seeking actual military participation in joint naval patrols and the like. He was leaving over the weekend for further consultations in the region. “Don’t talk about talks,” said Trump, “just ask for the money and the patrols.”50
Trump then set off into the Kerry/Logan Act riff, without which no meeting on Iran was really official. I brought the discussion to a conclusion by summarizing the decision, which was the breakfast package. Trump agreed and wanted to put out a statement, dictating we would “make a minor response to an unforced error by the Iranians.” Since the retaliation should have come as a surprise to Iran, no one else agreed, and the idea got lost in the shuffle. Trump asked when the strike would take place, and Dunford said they were estimating nine p.m. Washington time (by which he meant time-on-target). Dunford also said, “Mr. President, we will be back to you if they try to kill Americans in response,” and Trump said, “I don’t think so. I am worried about our soldiers in Syria. Get them out.” Dunford answered, “We want to get to that point,” and Trump answered, “Syria is not our friend.”
There were three significant aspects about the decision just reached: (1) we were hitting functioning military targets, as explained above, not merely symbolic ones; (2) we were hitting inside Iran, crossing an Iranian red line, and were certainly going to test their repeated assertions that such an attack would be met by a full-scale response; and (3) we were hitting targets likely entailing casualties, which question we had confronted, Trump having heard that the attacks he had ordered meant dead Iranians (and, possibly, dead Russians). After the fact, there were alternative theories about Trump’s stunning decision to cancel the strike, but I believe strongly that Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made the decision.
We had scheduled a congressional briefing, to which Pelosi arrived twenty minutes late. Trump waited with the rest of us in the Cabinet Room, and there was a stilted (to say the least) conversation. Huawei came up, and Chuck Schumer said, “You’ve got Democrats on your side,” regarding being tough on Huawei. Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chimed in to add, “There is no security with a Huawei network. We could lose credibility with our allies if we used it for trade [meaning exacting trade concessions from Beijing in exchange for rescinding the Huawei penalties].” Warner was right on this, but Trump believed everything was open in trade negotiations. When Pelosi finally rolled in, Trump explained the situation. Adam Schiff, the Democratic Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, asked what our plans were. Trump ducked by saying, “They [the Iranians] want to talk,” but blamed Kerry’s violation of the Logan Act for discouraging them. The Democrats worried about the use of military force, but Trump teased the idea of “a hit, but not a hit that’s going to be so devastating.” Trump said later, “Doing nothing is the biggest risk,” prompting Jim Risch to interject, “I agree,” and all Republicans concurred. Mike McCaul (R., Tex.) asked whether we could destroy the sites in Iran from which the attack had come. I hope all of us kept straight faces when Trump answered, “I can’t comment, but you’ll be happy.” Mitch McConnell asked, “How is this different from other periodic outbursts over the past number of years?” Trump responded correctly, “It’s not this [incident]. It’s where they want to go. We can’t let them have it [nuclear weapons].” Dunford added, “What’s qualitatively different is that it’s a direct attack from Iran. It’s attributable.”
This meeting ended at 4:20, and preparations for the attack accelerated. Expecting I would be in the White House all night, I went home at about 5:30 to get a change of clothes and return. Dunford had confirmed 7:00 p.m. was the go/no go point for the strike against the three Iranian sites, so I figured I had plenty of time before the 9:00 p.m. hit. I called Trump from the Secret Service SUV at about 5:35 and told him everything was on track. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.” I talked to Shanahan at 5:40 about the kind of statements he and Dunford would make at the Pentagon once the attacks concluded and whether they should take questions or just read written statements. I reached home, changed clothes, and turned around immediately, running into heavy inbound traffic on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. As I was riding in, Shanahan called with what turned out to be an erroneous report that the UK embassy in Iran had been attacked, and that he and Dunford had decided to delay the time-on-target point to 10:00 p.m. The source of this information was a UK liaison officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Shanahan said Pompeo was checking (and determined that it was a trivial automobile accident). I couldn’t believe the Pentagon had changed the time of attack entirely on its own, especially based on the scanty information involved. I called Trump to say we might have to postpone the attack for an hour, although we were still checking things out. Trump also didn’t understand why we had to delay things, but he didn’t object.
I called Dunford just after hanging up with Trump and was told the two of them were talking. Worried now that perhaps Shanahan and Dunford had gotten cold feet, I called Pompeo (who was at his residence) to compare notes. He thought Shanahan and Dunford were panicking, and were completely out of line; they had argued to him we should wait a couple of days, in light of the “attack” on the British embassy, to see if we could get the Brits to join the retaliation (although in light of subsequent events, this idea never went any further). It got worse. As Pompeo and I were talking, the Sit Room broke in to say Trump wanted to have a conference call with the two of us, Shanahan, and Dunford. Trump came on the line at perhaps 7:20 (I was now slowly crossing the Roosevelt Bridge across the Potomac) to say he had decided to call the strikes off because they were not “proportionate.” “A hundred fifty to one,” he said, and I thought perhaps he was referring to the number of missiles we might fire compared to the one Iranian missile that had brought down the Global Hawk. Instead, Trump said he had been told by someone unnamed there might be a hundred fifty Iranian casualties. “Too many body bags,” said Trump, which he was not willing to risk for an unmanned drone—“Not proportionate,” he said again. Pompeo tried to reason with him, but he wasn’t having it. Saying we could always strike later, Trump cut the discussion off, repeating he didn’t want to have a lot of body bags on television. I tried to change his mind, but I got nowhere. I said I was nearing the White House and would come to the Oval when I arrived.
In my government experience, this was the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any President do. It called to mind Kelly’s question to me: what would happen if we ever got into a real crisis with Trump as President? Well, we now had one, and Trump had behaved bizarrely, just as Kelly had feared. As I arrived at the White House entrance on West Executive Avenue, shortly after seven thirty p.m., Kupperman was outside to greet me to say the strike was off. I went by my office to drop off my briefcase and went straight to the Oval, where I found Cipollone, Eisenberg, and a Mulvaney staffer. I had a thoroughly surreal conversation with Trump, during which I learned that Eisenberg, on his own, had gone into the Oval with the “one hundred fifty casualties” number, a figure drawn up somewhere in the Defense Department (on which I learned more the next day), arguing it was illegal to retaliate in such a disproportionate way. This was all utter nonsense, both the so-called casualty figure, which no senior official had examined, and the legal argument, which was a grotesque misstatement of the proportionality principle. (After the event, commentators circulated a quotation from Stephen Schwebel, former US chief judge of the International Court of Justice, that “in the case of action taken for the specific purpose of halting and repelling an armed attack, this does not mean that the action should be more or less commensurate with the attack.”)51 Trump said he had called Dunford (probably the point where I trie
d to reach him) after Eisenberg spoke to him, and Dunford didn’t dispute the decision. Dunford told me the next day this was incorrect, but the damage was already done. I was at a loss for words, which must have been apparent to everyone in the Oval. I tried to explain that the purported “casualty” figures were almost entirely conjectural, but Trump wasn’t listening. He had in mind pictures of a hundred fifty body bags, and there was no explaining to be done. He offered no other justification, simply repeating his worry about television pictures of dead Iranians. Trump said finally, “Don’t worry, we can always attack later, and if we do it’ll be much tougher,” a promise worth exactly what I paid for it.
