Trump Is Briefed on Options for Striking Iran as Protests Continue

The president has said he will be “hitting them very hard” if Iranian leaders kill protesters amid widespread demonstrations calling for wholesale changes in the country.

President Trump has been briefed in recent days on new options for military strikes in Iran as he considers following through on his threat to attack the country for cracking down on protesters, according to multiple U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump has not made a final decision, but the officials said he was seriously considering authorizing a strike in response to the Iranian regime’s efforts to suppress demonstrations set off by widespread economic grievances. The president has been presented with a range of options, including strikes on nonmilitary sites in Tehran, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

Asked about planning for potential strikes, the White House referred to Mr. Trump’s public comments and social media posts in recent days.

“Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday. “The USA stands ready to help!!!”

The demonstrations in Iran began in late December in response to a currency crisis, but they have since spread and grown in size as many Iranians have called for wholesale changes to the country’s authoritarian government. Iranian officials have threatened to crack down on the demonstrations, and dozens of protesters have been killed, according to human rights groups.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Friday that the government would “not back down” in the face of large-scale protests.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to use lethal force against the Iranian government for its efforts to suppress demonstrations, and on Friday, he said that Iran “is in big trouble.”

“I’ve made the statement very strongly that if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday, while meeting with oil executives. “We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts. And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts. So we don’t want that to happen.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, according to three people with knowledge of the call. The two leaders discussed the protests in Iran, along with the situation in Syria and a peace deal in Gaza, the three people said.

Early on Saturday, Mr. Rubio wrote on a personal social media account that the United States “supports the brave people of Iran.”

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Since Mr. Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Venezuela on Jan. 3 and seize Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, and his wife, Cilia Flores, the administration has emphasized in numerous public statements that Mr. Trump is ready to take bold action in other contexts and to make good on his promises to carry out threats.

On Friday, the State Department posted a video with scenes of the nighttime attack on Venezuela on an official social media account, accompanied by the lines: “Do not play games with President Trump. When he says he’ll do something, he means it.”

Senior U.S. officials said on Saturday that at least some of the options presented to Mr. Trump for the situation in Iran would be tied directly to elements of the country’s security services that are using violence to put down the growing protests.

At the same time, though, U.S. officials said they had to be careful that any military strikes did not have the opposite effect — galvanizing the Iranian public to support the government — or trigger a set of retaliatory strikes that could threaten U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in the region.

A senior U.S military official said that commanders in the region would want more time before any potential attack to consolidate U.S. military positions and prepare defenses for any possible retaliatory strikes by Iran.

U.S. officials said any military action would have to balance how to fulfill Mr. Trump’s promise to punish the government in Tehran if it cracked down on the protesters with not making the situation worse.

Mr. Trump is considering attacking Iran again little more than six months after he ordered strikes against three of its nuclear sites last June.

In that attack, which the military called Midnight Hammer, six B-2 bombers dropped 12 bunker-buster bombs on a mountain facility at Fordo, and Navy submarines fired 30 cruise missiles at the nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan. One B-2 also dropped two bunker-buster bombs on Natanz.

Iran responded with missile barrages of its own, as well as offers to resume negotiations over its nuclear development program, which Iranian leaders say is purely for civilian use.

Late last month, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida, and discussed Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said he would not allow Iran to continue building up either of those capabilities.

Mr. Trump told reporters after the meeting that he had heard Iran was “behaving badly” and that he would support Israeli strikes on the country if Iranian officials persisted in expanding the nuclear and missile programs.

Mr. Trump has ordered airstrikes across the globe since the start of his second term nearly a year ago. In addition to the attack on Iran in June and the one on Jan. 3 in Venezuela, the U.S. military as dropped bombs or fired missiles in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria.

In his first term, in 2020, Mr. Trump ordered a drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq, that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a commander of Iran’s Quds Force, an elite unit inside the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

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