June 17, 2022
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bookend President Donald Trump at a
White House meeting in 2020.
In a new book, Mark Esper, Donald Trump’s secretary of defense in the second half of his term, writes that Trump was often eager to attack Iran, but then would back away when he was told how complicated and costly an attack would be and the grave chances that a full-scale war would result.
Esper also reveals that the decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani was not taken by Trump alone, as previously reported, but had the full support of every member of the national security staff that attended the decision meeting with Trump.
Esper also writes that after Iran retaliated for Soleymani’s death by firing 16 missiles at a US base, Iran sent messages to the US that its retaliation was finished and it planned no further actions—the exact opposite of what it has been telling the Iranian people ever since.
Esper details his interfaces with Trump on Iran in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a secretary of defense during extraordinary times.”
Two days after Trump asked Asper to be secretary of defense in June 2019, Iran shot down a $200 million Global Hawk, one of the Air Force’s spy drones, while it flew over international waters. The Pentagon proposed several options for retaliation, noting those that would likely cause casualties to Iranians. Trump, said Esper, fixated on the cost of the drone and wanted to strike something of greater value, “like an accountant keeping the books.” Esper expressed exasperation that Trump was acting like a businessman rather than a policymaker and ignored “the message we were trying to send” to Iran.
Trump approved the option that would likely do the most damage and cause the most casualties. Hours later, however, Trump canceled the retaliation when he was told the raid might kill up to 150 Iranians. He did not consult with the Pentagon or State Department, just ordered the cancelation on the fly, which irritated Esper even though Esper had not wanted the major retaliation. Esper came away frustrated by the “haphazard decision-making process.” And he was also aghast that Trump didn’t choose one of the less violent options; he just canceled the whole idea of any retaliation.
Esper wrote: “This first experience with the president jump-started a fast, chaotic, yet necessary learning process for me. As I would assess over time, Trump’s instincts weren’t always wrong about the policy or the end state he wanted to achieve. However, the odds of success were spoiled or the goal tarnished by the process he often followed (little to none); the strategy he usually pursued (narrow and incomplete); the consensus he normally built behind it (minimal and insufficient); and the manner in which he generally communicated it (coarsely and divisively).”
Three months later, Iran attacked Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil complex with missiles and drones. Esper said the Saudis had enough batteries of Patriot anti-missile missiles, but many of them were inoperable due to poor maintenance—which Esper said was a recurring problem with the Saudi military.
Again, Trump wanted to go with the harshest option, which Esper opposed. Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then focused on how many additional troops would first need to be dispatched to the Middle East to prepare for the harshest option—although Trump always talked about reducing the scale of troop deployments in the Middle East. “He was consistent on that matter,” Esper wrote. “When Milley and I talked him through what such a deployment would look like, he would back off.”
Again, nothing was done.
Then, on December 27, a rocket attack on an Iraqi base killed an American contractor—ironically an Iraqi-born naturalized American citizen. “A redline was crossed,” Esper wrote. “With an American killed, we had to respond.”
Esper recommended an airstrike on major sites used by the Iranian-supported Shiite militia in Iraq that had launched the rockets. Trump approved.
When the strike was over, Esper and Milley explained what had been done, including saying that at sites where the Pasdaran were known to be housed, the military intentionally didn’t target the buildings where they lived as part of an effort to message Tehran that Washington wasn’t seeking to escalate. Esper said Trump was mad to hear that. “His views on the use of force swung back and forth like a pendulum,” Esper wrote with exasperation.
Iran’s response to those attacks was to mobilize the Iraqi militias for huge demonstrations outside the US embassy in Baghdad. At the same time, US intelligence reported that Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleymani, the commander of Iran’s Qods Force, was traveling to Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus orchestrating a plan for multiple attacks on Americans that would kill a large number and, Soleymani hoped, precipitate a US withdrawal from Iraq. US intelligence said, “The plan was likely only days away from initiation,” Esper explained.
Esper said the result of Soleymani’s plan was far more likely to result in an outright war as the US responded to the deaths of a large number of Americans.
That intelligence on Soleymani brought to the forefront a long dormant idea about killing Soleymani. At a White House meeting with Trump and senior military and foreign policy officials, the assassination was discussed. The Iran Times has previously reported that Trump adopted the assassination option against the advice of most of his aides. But Esper says that is wrong. He writes that Trump queried everyone in the room and then called for Soleymani to be killed by a drone that night “with the uniform support of his national security team.”
A drone overhead transmitted video of Soleymani deplaning at Baghdad Airport. At the Pentagon, Esper watched as the general was greeted by Iraqi militia leaders and then got into a car. The drone tracked the car as it headed down a road to the airport exit. Esper thought the car was going at a very high speed. Esper worried that the car might leave the airport before the attack could be launched. Then the car erupted in a giant flash of light as a missile from another drone hit it.
From Florida, Trump issued a statement vowing that if Iran responded he would take out 52 Iranian sites—one for every hostage held in 1980-81. Esper was appalled. The Pentagon didn’t have a list of 52 possible targets. The next day, Trump threatened to attack Iranian cultural sites. Esper choked, since that would violate international law.
Five days after Soleymani’s death, the Islamic Republic retaliated by firing 16 missiles at two bases in Iraq at which Americans were stationed. Four of the missiles were defective and fell well short of their targets and one landed on the target but did not explode.
The US military had no anti-missile missiles in Iraq because Iran had never before fired missiles at American targets.
But now the question was whether the US would retaliate for the Iranian retaliation. Esper writes that the State Department was exchanging messages with Iran through the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Esper says Iran was “conveying that the evening’s ballistic missile salvos were their last action, even without determining the impact of their strike. There would be no further attacks from them; they wanted things to end.”
This was the exact opposite of what the regime was telling the Iranian public. In fact, even to this day, the Islamic Republic says publicly it is still planning further retaliation for Soleymani’s assassination.
What’s more, Esper says, “We would soon observe Tehran exercising far greater effort to reign in the Shia militia groups in Iraq.”
But Trump wasn’t calming down.
A few months later, at the end of a meeting with the CENTCOM commander on Afghanistan, Trump raised Iran again and asked about options for attacking Iran. Esper says he and Milley went into overdrive to make clear to Trump that any attack would take lots of preparation, require moving many more forces into the region and would mean the loss of American planes, ships and troops. “It was all more than enough to put the president’s appetite back on ice,” Esper said.
