NBC: Trump Will Only Order Military Attack On Iran If 'Decisive'

Translation: Donald Trump doesn't want to "fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." Maybe he has more in common with George W. Bush than Trump likes to admit. Or maybe Trump has reason to wonder whether military reprisals on Iran would do much to collapse the regime. AP Photo/Evan Vucci Having issued a red line on Friday and then declaring to protesters in Iran that "help is on the way," Trump now has to weigh what exactly "help" means. According to NBC News , Trump wants to take action but only if it is "decisive," precisely what Bush said in the aftermath of 9/11 in his "camel's butt" quote: President Donald Trump has told his national security team that he would want any U.S. military action in Iran to deliver a swift and decisive blow to the regime and not spark a sustained war that dragged on for weeks or months, according to a U.S. official, two people familiar with the discussions and a person close to the White House. “If he does something, he wants it to be definitive,” one of the people familiar with the discussions said. But Trump’s advisers have so far not been able to guarantee to him that the regime would quickly collapse after an American military strike, the U.S. official and two people familiar with the discussions said, and there is concern that the U.S. may not have all the assets in the region it would need to guard against what administration officials expect would be an aggressive Iranian response. Those dynamics could lead Trump to approve a more limited U.S. military offensive in Iran, at least initially, while reserving options to escalate - if he decides to take any military action at all, said the U.S. official and one of the people familiar with the discussions. They said that it is a fast-evolving situation and that as of Wednesday afternoon no decisions had been made. "Decisive" is a high bar for the kind of military options the US has. The mission in June was simpler; it just aimed to destroy Iran's capacity to develop nuclear weapons. Trump not only refrained from attempting remote regime change, he reportedly convinced Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid it during the Twelve Day War as well. Without boots on the ground, it would be almost impossible to dislodge the IRGC and its military junta, even if a strike on Iran eliminated Ali Khamenei and his mullah council. If a strike would not be in itself "decisive," would it actually help? That has been a question raised by some factions of the Iranian opposition. Some worry that direct American military involvement would delegitimize the popular uprising, and prefer more "maximum pressure" instead. Even worse, strikes that take aim at the leadership of the mullahcracy might justify a full-war response from the IRGC, which would put dissenters in even more peril and put the entire nation at risk of becoming a...

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