WASHINGTON — A senior White House official said Sunday that Iran’s “new potential leadership” has suggested it is open to talks with the United States after American and Israeli forces launched a major attack against Tehran, killing the country’s supreme leader and other high-ranking officials.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations, said President Donald Trump says he is “eventually” willing to talk but that for now the military operation “continues unabated.” The official did not say who the potential new Iranian leaders are or how they made their alleged willingness to talk known.
Trump told the Atlantic on Sunday that he planned to speak with Iran’s new leadership.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he said, declining to comment on the timing.
The potential future diplomatic opening comes as new details are emerging about the detailed planning that went into the U.S.-Israeli strikes and some of the targets that were hit in Iran.
U.S. Central Command said that B-2 stealth bombers struck Iran’s ballistic missile facilities with 2,000-pound bombs. That mirrors the approach that the military took in June, when Trump agreed to deploy B-2 bombers to attack three key Iranian nuclear sites.
Trump claimed in his State of the Union speech last week that Iran had been building ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S. homeland — a justification he repeated again Saturday as he announced that the bombardment of Iran was underway.
Iran has not acknowledged that it is building or seeking to build intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, however, said in an unclassified report last year that Iran could develop a militarily viable intercontinental ballistic missile by 2035 “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
Before the attacks, the CIA had for months tracked the movements of senior Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a person familiar with the operation.
The intelligence was shared with Israeli officials, and the timing of the strikes was adjusted in part because of that information about the Iranian leaders’ location, according to the person, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The intelligence sharing between U.S. and Israel reflects the preparation that went into the strikes, which continued for a second day Sunday after Khamenei’s killing threw the future of the Islamic Republic into uncertainty and raised the risk of escalating regional conflict.
The New York Times earlier reported about the CIA’s efforts before the Israeli-U.S. strikes.
Sen. Tom Cotton, chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declined to discuss details Sunday when asked on CBS’ Face the Nation about intelligence sharing with Israel. But he said tracking the movements of the supreme leader and the heads of other adversarial nations “is obviously one of the highest priorities of our intelligence community.”
“Clearly, this operation is driven by intelligence collected by Israel and the United States that has once again proven that our nations have capabilities that no other nation on Earth has,” said Cotton (R., Ark.).
The U.S. regularly shares intelligence with allies including Israel. Those partnerships, and the accuracy of the intelligence they yield, is often critical not only to the success of a military operation but also to the public’s support for it.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the senior Democrat on the committee, told the Associated Press that historically, “our working relationship with the Mossad and Israel is really strong.” Mossad is the Israeli spy agency.
Warner said he has serious concerns about the justification for the strikes, Trump’s long-term plans for the conflict, and the risks that U.S. service members will face. The military announced Sunday that three American troops had been killed and five were seriously wounded in the Iran operation.
“No tears will be shed over their leadership being eliminated but always the question is: OK, what next?” Warner said.
Barely an hour after the first U.S. and Israeli missiles struck Iran, President Donald Trump made clear he hoped for regime change. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny,” he told the Iranian people in a video. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Doesn’t sound complicated. After all, with Iran’s fundamentally unpopular government weakened by fierce airstrikes, some of its top leaders dead or missing and Washington signaling support, how hard could it be to overthrow a repressive regime?
Possibly very hard. So says history.
Washington has a long, complicated past when it comes to regime change. There was Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, and Panama in 1989. There was Nicaragua in the 1980s, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years after 9/11, and Venezuela just weeks ago.
There was also Iran. In 1953, the CIA helped engineer a coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader and gave near-absolute power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But as with the shah, who was overthrown in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution after decades of increasingly unpopular rule, regime change rarely goes as planned.
Attempts to usher in U.S.-friendly governments often start with clear intentions, whether hope for democracy in Iraq or backing an anti-Communist leader in Congo at the Cold War’s height. But often those intentions stumble into a political quagmire where democratic dreams turn into civil war, once-compliant dictators become embarrassments, and American soldiers return home in body bags.
That history has long been a Trump talking point. “We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change,” he said in 2016.
“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in a 2025 speech in Saudi Arabia, deriding U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The “interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
Now, after Saturday’s actions, a key question emerges: Does today’s U.S. government understand what it’s getting into?
It’s unclear what regime change would even mean
Iran’s economy is in shambles and dissent remains strong even after a brutal January crackdown on protests left thousands of people dead and tens of thousands under arrest. Many of the nation’s key military proxies and allies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad government in Syria — have been weakened or eliminated. And early Sunday, Iranian state media confirmed that Israel and the United States had killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The United States hasn’t laid out a postwar vision and doesn’t necessarily even want a complete overthrow of the Iranian leadership. As in Venezuela, it may already have potential allies in the government willing to step into a power vacuum.
“But there’s a lot that needs to happen between now and a possible scenario along these lines,” said Jonathan Schanzer, executive director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank that is deeply critical of the Iranian government. “There needs to be a sense that there is no salvation for the regime as such, and that they will need to work with the United States.”
In a country where the core leaders are deeply united by ideology and religion, that may be extremely difficult.
“The question to my mind right now is have we been able to penetrate the ranks of the regime that are not true believers that are more pragmatic,” Schanzer said. “Because I don’t believe that the true believers will flip.”
It’s simply too early to know if — or how much — the political winds are shifting in Tehran. The leaders who come next could turn out to be equally repressive or seen domestically as illegitimate U.S. stooges.
“We’ll see whether elements of the regime start moving against each other,” said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “Air power can damage a leadership,” he said. “But it can’t guarantee that you’ll bring in something new.”
U.S. intervention in Latin America has a long history
In Latin America, Washington’s history of intervention goes back a long way — to when President James Monroe claimed the hemisphere as part of the U.S. sphere of influence more than 200 years ago.
If the Monroe Doctrine began as a way to keep European countries out of the region, by the 20th century it was justifying everything from coups in Central America to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Very often, historians say, that intervention led to violence, bloodshed, and mass human rights violations. Therein, they say, lies a lesson.
Direct U.S. involvement has rarely “resulted in long-term democratic stability,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at the London think tank Chatham House. He points to Guatemala, where U.S. intervention in the 1950s led to a civil war that didn’t end for 40 years and left more than 200,000 people dead.
Or there’s Nicaragua, where backing of the Contra rebels against the Sandinista government in the 1980s contributed to a prolonged civil conflict that devastated the economy, caused tens of thousands of deaths and deepened political polarization.
While large-scale, overt U.S. involvement in the region mostly petered out after the Cold War, Trump has rekindled the legacy.
Since assuming office last year, Trump launched boat strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, ordered a naval blockade on Venezuelan oil exports, and got involved in electoral politics in Honduras and Argentina. Then, on Jan. 3, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan strongman leader Nicolás Maduro, flying him to the U.S. to face drug and weapons charges.
What followed in Caracas may signal what the White House hopes will happen in Tehran. Many observers thought the U.S. would back María Corina Machado, who has long been the face of political resistance in Venezuela. Instead, Washington effectively sidelined her and has repeatedly shown a willingness to work with President Delcy Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s second-in-command.
“There are those who could claim that what we did in Venezuela is not regime change,” said Schanzer, at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The regime is still in place. There’s just one person that’s missing.”
PALM BEACH, Fla. – President Donald Trump’s major attack on Iran has rattled parts of the coalition that twice delivered him the White House, a fracture that could spell trouble for a divided GOPas the midterm elections approach.
The strikes, which killed Iran’s supreme leader, followed a visible buildup of U.S. forces in the Middle East. But Trump’s decision to carry them out nonetheless surprised some of his supporters, who had expected the self-described anti-interventionist president to stop short of a direct attack.
Nineteen-year-old Cooper Jacks said his phone lit upSaturday with messages from fellow Republicans in “disbelief” at the U.S. attack on Iran — a reaction that reflected not just surprise at Trump’s decision, but anxiety about what a new conflict could demand of younger Americans.
“We often have politicians that are way past the age to be able to fight these wars being all ready to say, yeah, go fight it, and then that burden falls on my generation,” said Jacks, an officer with the Walker County Republican Party in Georgia.
For some voters, Trump’s decision marked a clear break from the isolationist posture that once defined his political appeal. While the more hawkish wing heralded the opening salvo, others in the partyaccused Trump of betraying the populist ideology that propelled him to power. In interviews and on social media, many Trump supporters — both prominent conservatives and rank-and-file voters — were careful to withhold final judgment until seeing whether the president could swiftly end the conflict he started. Others reaffirmed their support for Trump.
Ultimately, the Iran strike poses a test of how much warTrump’s coalition will tolerate from a president who promised to end them —particularly if a prolonged fight brings economic pain to everyday Americans.
“The base is solid with President Trump, and they want him to succeed,” said John McLaughlin, a longtime Trump pollster. “It’s about national security and stopping Iran, a terrorist state, from getting nuclear weapons and killing any more Americans.”
The political stakes of the military action are heightened by the approaching midterm elections, when the party of a sitting president often faces stiff headwinds. Polls show Trump’s approval ratings are at 39%, the lowest since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Republicans are worried they could lose control of Congress.
Beyond the immediate electoral math, the Iran strike has also sharpened a longer-running debate inside the party over what a post-Trump identity might look like — and which faction of a divided GOP will ultimately dominate.
Blake Neff, the producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, wrote on X that right-leaning friends were messaging him in dismay about Iran:
“This is extremely depressing.”
“Never voting in a national election again.”
Neff warned: “If this war is a swift, easy, and decisive victory, most of them will get over it. But if the war is anything else, there will be a lot of anger.”
Trump told Axios on Saturday that he had several “off-ramps” to the conflict. But in a Truth Social post later that afternoon, he said the bombing “will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
Hours later, he warned of further escalation.
“Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever hit before,” he wrote on Truth Social. “THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”
Last week, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 46% of Trump voters supported Trump using the U.S. military to force changes in other countries, while 22% opposed this and 30% had no opinion.
Trump won his first term by attacking the foreign policy of former President George W. Bush and calling the U.S. war in Iraq a “big fat mistake.” He clinched a second term promising to expel “the warmongers” from government and warning that his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, would get the U.S. entangled in another costly conflict abroad. He told supporters he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
“I will stop the chaos in the Middle East,” Trump told the crowd at his final rally before the 2024 election in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I will prevent World War III.”
On the campaign trail, he also stressed that Iran must not get a nuclear weapon.
Trump has repeatedly cast himself in his second term as the peacemaker the world needs, claiming credit for ending or averting conflicts abroad and arguing that his leadership will accomplish what traditional international institutions, such as the United Nations, have not.
He swept into office under the banner of “America First” isolationism but has adopted a muscular foreign policy approach, “peace through strength.” He bombed nuclear sites in Iran in the summer, toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, and now has unleashed a barrage in the Middle East that he said is aimed at regime change.
MAGA allies long skeptical of foreign intervention have so far largely stuck by the president,even as many questioned his evolution. Trump officials cast the strikes on Iran last summer as a limited intervention meant to take out a nuclear threat — and pushback within his coalition faded as the conflict ended without morphing into a broader war.
But each conflict has threatened more entanglement abroad than the last, testing the movement’s tolerance.
“Trump, who is very news-cycle savvy, is addicted to the glamour and the attention that foreign interventions engender him and his administration, even though they are not making him more popular,” Curt Mills, executive director of American Conservative, a right-wing magazine that is skeptical of neoconservative foreign policy, said in an interview Saturday with the Washington Post.
Natalie Winters, a co-host for Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast War Room, criticized the Trump administration for failing to adequately justify the strikes.
“The messaging, much like the Epstein files, is all over the place. I would think they would know their base better,” she told the Post. “Some of his donors are probably happy so congratulations to them.”
Meanwhile, many of Trump’s most loyal supporters have echoed his “peace through strength” arguments. Nearly 6 in 10 Trump voters who identified with the MAGA movement supported using the U.S. military to force changes in other countries, compared with fewer than 3 in 10 who didn’t support MAGA, the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found.
“I changed my view on MAGA a little bit. In order for us to be what we once were, we’ve got to support the rest of the world,” said Robert Pratt, 70, a veteran who self-identifies as part of the MAGA movement. “We’ve got to protect our allies, and I think MAGA is now a part of that. It’s not just about us.”
Pratt said his feelings could change if the conflict in Iran lasts for too long; he doesn’t want a repeat of the war in Iraq.
“My concept of war is a lot like Trump’s is: If you’re going to do it, do it and get it over with,” he said. “I don’t want stuff where we get mixed up in some conflict that goes on for years and years.”
On Saturday, as Trump continued to direct attacks in Iran, Jacks saw on social media an old tweet from Vice President JD Vance urging the U.S. to learn from the failures of its war in Iraq. His former congressional representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally turned critic, accused the president of abandoning his “America First” movement and campaign promises to stay out of far-flung conflicts.
“Now, America is going to be force fed and gas lighted all the ‘noble’ reasons the American ‘Peace’ President and Pro-Peace administration had to go to war once again this year, after being in power for only a year,” Greene wrote in a blistering post on X. “Head-spinning, but maga.”
Then Jacks read in the news that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed — a major blow against an oppressive regime, he thought.
The U.S. strike could be a big success, he said — “if we’re not entering a long-term military conflict that’s going to result in the deaths of Americans that don’t really want to fight it.”
AUSTIN, Texas — The gunman who killed two people at a bar in Texas early Sunday in a mass shooting being investigated by the FBI as a potential act of terrorism was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Property of Allah,” and another shirt with an Iranian flag design, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press.
The shooting, which also left 14 wounded, erupted a day after the United States launched an attack on Iran with Israel that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The gunman was identified as 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
He first entered the U.S in 2000 on a B-2 tourist visa and became a lawful permanent resident six years later after marrying a U.S. citizen, according to DHS. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2013, the department said. Diagne was originally from Senegal, according to multiple people briefed on the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.
Officers in Austin shot and killed the gunman, who used both a pistol and a rifle to carry out the attack, police said.
The suspect drove past the bar several times before stopping and shooting a pistol out the window of his SUV at people on a patio and in front of the bar, according to Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis.
The gunman then parked the vehicle, got out with a rifle and began shooting at people walking in the area before officers who rushed to the intersection shot him, Davis said. Three of those injured were in critical condition Sunday morning, police said.
Authorities found “indicators” on the gunman and in his vehicle leading the FBI to look into the possibility of terrorism, said Alex Doran, the acting agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio office.
“It’s still too early to make a determination on that,” Doran said Sunday morning.
The White House said President Donald Trump had been briefed on the shooting.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned that the state would respond aggressively to anyone trying to “use the current conflict in the Middle East to threaten Texas.”
“We will not be intimidated, and we will not be terrorized,” he said in a statement.
The shooting happened outside Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden just before 2 a.m. along Sixth Street, a nightlife destination filled with bars and music clubs and only a few miles from the University of Texas.
The school’s president said on social media that some of those impacted included “members of our Longhorn family.”
“Our prayers are with the victims and all those impacted,” said university President Jim Davis.
The entertainment district has a heavy police presence on weekends, and officers were able to confront the gunman within a minute of the first call for help, Davis said.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson praised the fast response by police and rescuers.
“They definitely saved lives,” he said.
One of the victims was found in the street between two parked cars. Inside the multistory bar, there were overturned tables and drinks left behind by fleeing customers.
There have been at least two other high-profile shootings in Austin’s Sixth Street entertainment district within the past five years, including one in the summer of 2021 that left 14 people wounded. Although this weekend’s shooting doesn’t meet the definition of a mass killing, there have been five of those so far this year.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. and Israel pounded targets across Iran on Sunday, dropping massive bombs on the country’s ballistic missile sites and wiping out warships as part of an intensifying military campaign following the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Blasts rattled windows across the country and sent plumes of smoke high into the sky above Tehran. More than 200 people have been killed since the start of the strikes that killed Khamenei and other senior leaders, Iranian leaders have said.
Iran vowed revenge, firing missiles at Israel and Gulf Arab states in a counteroffensive that the U.S. military said resulted in the deaths of three service members — the first known American casualties from the conflict. Israeli rescue services said strikes had hit several locations, including Jerusalem and a synagogue in the central town of Beit Shemesh, where nine people were killed and 28 wounded, bringing the overall death toll in the country to 11. Eleven people were still missing after the strike, police said.
But the attacks on Iran showed no signs of relenting as the U.S. and Israel took aim at key military, political, and intelligence targets in what appeared to be a widening war that carried the potential for a prolonged conflict that could envelop the Middle East and destabilize it. The strikes, the second time in eight months that the U.S. and Israel had combined against Iran, represented a startling show of military might for an American president who swept into office on an “America First” platform and vowed to keep out of “forever wars.”
U.S. President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “avenge” the deaths of the service members and that “there will likely be more” killed before the conflict ends.
In a video he posted on social media, Trump called the three service members “true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation, even as we continue the righteous mission for which they gave their lives.”
He added: “Sadly, there will likely be more, before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”
Israel, which had pledged “nonstop” strikes, said it was increasing its attacks, with 100 fighter jets simultaneously striking targets in Tehran, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin told reporters at a briefing. The targets included buildings belonging to Iran’s air force, its missile command, and its internal security force, which violently quashed anti-government protests in January.
The U.S. military, meanwhile, said B-2 stealth bombers struck Iran’s ballistic missile facilities with 2,000-pound bombs. Trump said on social media that nine Iranian warships had been sunk and that the Iranian navy’s headquarters had been “largely destroyed.”
Europe has mostly stayed out of the war and pressed for diplomacy, but in an indication that the conflict could draw in other nations, Britain, France, and Germany said Sunday they were ready to work with the U.S. to help stop Iran’s attacks.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Britain would allow the United States to use its bases to strike Iranian missile sites. The U.K. maintains nearby bases on Cyprus and the Chagos Islands, a British archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
In the 12-day war last June, Israeli and American strikes greatly weakened Iran’s air defenses, military leadership, and nuclear program. But the killing of Khamenei, who ruled Iran for more than three decades, creates a leadership vacuum, increasing the risk of regional instability.
Trump, who a day earlier had encouraged Iranians to “take over” their government, signaled Sunday that he was open to dialogue with Iran’s new leadership.
“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he told the Atlantic.
Streets of Tehran are largely deserted
In Tehran, there was little sign that Iranians had heeded Trump’s call for an uprising against the government.
The streets were largely deserted as people sheltered during heavy airstrikes, witnesses told the Associated Press, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution. The paramilitary Basij, which has played a central role in crushing protests, set up checkpoints across the city, they said.
Two powerful explosions were heard in Tehran’s Niavaran neighborhood late Sunday.
An eyewitness in the city told AP that the windows of their apartment shook violently, and residents came out onto the streets fearing it was too dangerous to stay inside. The witness spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Video footage from Tehran showed plumes of smoke filling the skyline, and the official IRNA news agency reported that parts of the building of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting were struck Sunday.
In southern Iran, at least 165 people were killed Saturday when a girls’ school was struck, and dozens more were wounded, IRNA reported. The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area. The U.S. military said it was looking into the reports.
The U.S. military did not provide details about the three service members who were killed or about five others who were seriously wounded. It said several others suffered minor injuries and concussions.
Iran says new leadership is in place
As supreme leader, Khamenei had final say on all major policies since 1989. He led Iran’s clerical establishment and the Revolutionary Guard, the two main centers of power in the governing theocracy.
The CIA had been tracking the movements of senior Iranian leaders, including Khamenei, for months, according to a person familiar with the operation who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The intelligence was shared with Israeli officials, and the timing of the strikes was adjusted in part because of that information, the person said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a prerecorded message that a new leadership council had begun its work. The country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said a new supreme leader would be chosen in “one or two days.”
Iran vows revenge for Khamenei killing
As word spread of Khamenei’s death, some in Tehran could be seen cheering from rooftops, witnesses said. Others mourned as a black flag was raised over the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad.
An Iranian medical professional in northern Iran said he and colleagues spent the early hours of Sunday celebrating Khamenei’s death indoors because armed security forces are still heavily deployed in his city.
There were forces stopping and interrogating people celebrating in their cars, but there was no gunfire, said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“It was one of the best nights, if not the best night of our lives,” the doctor said in a voice message from the city of Rasht. In fact, “it was actually my first time ever smoking a cigarette. It was a very, very nice time. We didn’t sleep at all. And we don’t even feel tired.”
Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, blamed the U.S. and Israel for starting the war. He said he had spoken to his counterparts in the Gulf countries and urged them to pressure the U.S. and Israel to end it.
“You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, said in a televised address. “We will deliver such devastating blows that you yourselves will be driven to beg.”
Trump warned against any retaliation.
“THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT,” he said in a social media post. “IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”
Strikes planned for months, feared for weeks
Tensions have escalated in recent weeks as the Trump administration built up the largest force of American warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades. The president insisted he wanted a deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear program while the country struggled with growing dissent following nationwide protests.
An Israeli military official described Saturday’s mission as the result of months of “extremely high coordination” with the U.S. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a covert operation, said a variety of factors created a “golden opportunity” to take out much of Iran’s leadership. Those factors included weeks of training and monitoring the movements of senior figures, along with “real time intelligence” that the targets were gathered together.
The results, the official said, were near-simultaneous strikes, within 60 seconds of one another, in three locations 1,000 miles from Israel that killed Khamenei and some 40 senior figures, including the head of the Revolutionary Guard and the country’s defense minister.
President Donald Trump launched Saturday’s wide-ranging attack on Iran after a weekslong lobbying effort by an unusual pair of U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel and Saudi Arabia — according to four people familiar with the matter, as Israeli and U.S. forces teamed to topple Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei after nearly four decades in power.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution, the four people said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, continued his long-running public campaign for U.S. strikes against what he views as an existential enemy of his country.
The combined effort helped lead Trump to order a massive aerial campaign against Iran’s leadership and military, which in its initial hour led to the death of Khamenei and several other senior Iranian officials.
The attack came despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran’s forces were unlikely to pose an immediate threat to the U.S. mainland within the next decade. Saturday’s attack on Iran was a break from decades of U.S. decision-making to hold back from a full-scale effort to depose the regime of a country of more than 90 million people. It also marked a stark shift from Trump’s own previous military forays, which until now have been far narrower in scope.
Now Trump will bear the risk of the bet he has placed: that a major military operation conducted from the air can achieve political goals on the ground.
“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” Trump told Iranians in a video address posted as U.S. bombs rained down on targets across Iran. “Now you have a president who is giving you what you want, so let’s see how you respond.”
The Saudi push for an attack came as presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner pursued negotiations with Iranian leaders over the country’s nuclear and missile programs.
In this photo released by the Oman’s Foreign Ministry, Steve Witkoff, White House special envoy, centre, shakes hands with Oman’s Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi as Jared Kushner, left, looks on during their meeting prior to Iran and the U.S. negotiations, in Muscat, Oman, Friday, Feb. 6, 2026. (Oman Foreign Ministry via AP)
As those talks proceeded, Riyadh issued a statement, following a phone call between the crown prince and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, that Mohammed would not allow Saudi airspace or territory to be used in an attack on Iran.
In his discussions with U.S. officials, however, the Saudi leader warned that Iran would come away stronger and more dangerous if the United States did not strike now, after amassing the largest military presence in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, said the people, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation.
Mohammed’s position was reinforced by his brother, Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman, who held closed-door meetings with U.S. officials in Washington in January and warned about the downsides of not attacking, the people said.
The Saudi leader’s complicated position probably reflected his desire to avoid Iranian retaliation against his country’s vulnerable oil infrastructure, weighed against his view of Tehran as Riyadh’s ultimate foe in the region, said those familiar with his thinking. Iran, dominated by Shiite Muslims, and Saudi Arabia, led by Sunnis, have long had an intense rivalry that has generated proxy wars in the region.
Following the initial U.S. attack on Saturday, Iran did retaliate against Saudi Arabia. Riyadh issued a furious statement condemning the attack and calling on the international community to “take all necessary and decisive measures” to confront Iran.
The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
Witkoff and Kushner had their final contacts with Iranian officials in Geneva on Thursday, their third high-level encounter since early February. They walked away believing that Tehran was playing games with them about its need for nuclear enrichment, according to a senior Trump administration official.
“It was very clear that the intent for them was to preserve their ability to do enrichment so that, over time, they could use it for a nuclear bomb,” the official said.
By Friday afternoon, when Trump arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas, for a campaign rally ahead of Tuesday primaries there, the president’s frustration — and his rhetoric — was escalating. He repeatedly declared himself “not happy” with Iranian negotiators.
“I’ve got a lot of things going on now,” he told the crowd toward the end of a rambling speech ostensibly focused on energy policy. “We have a big decision to make, you know that. Not easy, not easy. We have a very big decision to make.”
Later, he flew to Palm Beach for the weekend, where he mingled with supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort Friday evening, looking tired but otherwise in good sprits before exiting to his private quarters to record a speech he would give announcing the attack, according to one person who was there and interacted with him.
The decision to launch the attack was in some ways foretold by the massive buildup of U.S. forces over the past two months. But there was little in Trump’s record to suggest that he would embrace a war of choice in the Middle East with the goal of regime change.
In explaining his decision, Trump on Saturday reached all the way back to Iran’s 1979 revolution. He described the U.S. attacks as payback for decades of conflict with Iran. He cited the 52 Americans held hostage for more than a year after the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran; the deaths of 241 U.S. service members in 1983 bombing of their barracks in Beirut by Iran-backed Hezbollah during a Lebanese civil war; and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, a naval destroyer docked in a Yemen, which Trump said Iran “probably” was involved in, although the United States has long attributed the suicide bombing to al-Qaeda.
Earlier Saturday, Trump said that the United States had faced “imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Tehran was continuing to work toward producing a nuclear weapon and development of “long-range missiles that … could soon reach the American homeland.”
National Guard members watch as people protest near the White House against U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)
Both of those assertions have been challenged. Trump himself has vehemently maintained that the U.S. “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program with airstrikes this past summer. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said there is no evidence Iran has restarted its uranium enrichment program following those strikes or that it has an active bomb-building plan. In an assessment last year, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cited no indication that Iran was embarking on development of an intercontinental ballistic missile. If it decided to do so, the DIA said, it would take a decade to produce.
Trump directed anti-government Iranians to “take over” their government, but his call included no details. He declared that those within Iran’s extensive military and security infrastructure would be given “complete immunity” but provided no explanation how or by whom that would be done.
During both his first and second terms, Trump has said consistently there would be no American boots on the ground in military operations that he launched. Since taking office again, while launching air and missile attacks on seven countries — Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran — he largely has kept that promise.
But it remains unclear whether aircraft and missile strikes can achieve his ever-expanding goals — among them new, U.S.-friendly regimes in Iran and Venezuela; an end to Iran-backed militant operations in Yemen; and the defeat of Islamic terrorist operations in Nigeria and Somalia.
“History is not kind to efforts to fundamentally alter and restructure the internal politics of a country using the air power alone,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who worked on Middle East issues for both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“This is very much Trumpian, in the sense that he’s tried to split the difference between getting bogged down in an interminable conflict which will undermine the American economy and cost Americans their lives, on one hand, and yet bringing to bear the power of the American military in a sort of roll-the-dice operation,” Miller said.
Months of planning for the 2003 U.S. toppling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein included thousands of invading American forces that remained there for nearly a decade and a large cadre of civilian U.S. officials on the ground to organize a new government.
Top Trump officials — some of whom have been sharp critics of the Iraq effort and other U.S. forays into the Middle East — have insisted in recent days that this time will be different.
Vice President JD Vance speaks during a news conference in the Old Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Vice President JD Vance on Thursday told the Washington Post that he still considers himself a “skeptic” of foreign military interventions — a description he said still applied to Trump, too. He said there was “no chance” any military operation by the U.S. in Iran would lead to a drawn-out war involving the Trump administration.
Vance on Saturday watched the military operation from the Situation Room at the White House, while dialed into a conference line that connected him to the president and his national security team, who were tracking Iran from Mar-a-Lago, according to a person with knowledge of the events. Vance was joined at the White House by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who has long campaigned against war with Iran. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were in the Situation Room too, the person said.
Apart from Trump’s Saturday’s statements once the attack already started, the president has devoted little time to publicly justifying or explaining war with Iran, a break from previous practice of U.S. leaders.
Democrats on Saturday pushed Trump to explain his case to the American people.
“What was the imminent threat to America?” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (D., Va.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an interview. “I don’t know the answer.”
Warner, who participated in a classified briefing on Tuesday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, said that senior lawmakers were given a “fair description of options” the administration was considering, but that he saw no threat that “would literally be worthy of putting our troops in harm’s way.”
In the briefing on Tuesday for the Gang of Eight, which consists of the leaders of the House, the Senate and each chamber’s intelligence committees, Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated to lawmakers that the mission’s timing and goals were shaped by the fact that Israel was going to attack with or without the United States, according to a person familiar with the administration’s outreach to lawmakers.
“So the only debate that seemed to be remaining was whether the U.S. would launch in concert with Israel or if the U.S. would wait until Iran retaliated on U.S. military targets in the region and then engage,” the person said.
Now the question is what comes next.
For now, Trump says that he hopes that in the face of the death of Khamenei, Iran’s security forces and police “will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.” In January, those security forces killed thousands of Iranian protesters.
He vowed that “the heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
As part of a job search, outsourcing and offshoring company Oceans asked candidates to make a video answering one question: What is your most controversial personal conviction about the workplace? The company received more than 300 responses and most of them were eerily similar.
“It was abundantly clear it was [artificial intelligence],” Matt Wallaert, Oceans’ chief experience officer, said of the repeatedanswers, which also followed the same structure. It was like “you did the laziest possible … you failed the basic task of sharing your personal beliefs.”
The situation left Wallaert and the hiring team bewildered on how to evaluate the candidates, as even some of the most qualified blended together.
Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market. With a plethora of AI tools, some employers may be screening applicants’ resumés, deprioritizing them as candidates. Employers say that’s having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same. AI has complicated the process for both employers and job seekers leaving both sides at odds over how to get what they want.
It’s easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn’t normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancyvocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicatesthey are much more senior, they added.
It’s worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications, and submit resumés on the candidate’s behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriatespots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they’d have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI’s role in it becomes obvious.
Joseph Eitner, chief human resources officer for New York-based investment firm Eaton Capital Management, said he has no issue with candidates turning to AI to add some keywords, clean up their grammar, or even help them think through a question on the application. But ultimately, he said, candidates should do the writing themselves, express their own ideas and personalities, and take the time to manually submit their applications.
“If that’s how you apply and how you work, I don’t want to hire you,” he said. AI auto-apply services are “snake oil. It’s a disservice to yourself and to the people you’re applying to.”
Not all employers rely heavily on AI to screen applicants, according to Ron Sharon, chief information security officer in Denver at financial advisory firm PTMA Financial Solutions, and some only use it to help them prioritize people with the necessary experience. Sharon said he uses an AI tool that assigns percentages to candidates based on their qualifications. Anyone who hits a 75% or above will be considered for the job, he said, but AI never automatically rejects a candidate.
“I use AI as a tool to help me augment what I do,” he said. “Job seekers should use it to help them augment what they do. They shouldn’t use AI for the complete process.”
But some job seekers say the ways that employers started using the technology to rank candidates prompted them to adopt it.
Stephen Harris, a 37-year-old in San Antonio who’s seeking a job as a tech support specialist, said he’ll stop using AI to write his resumé once recruiters stop using AI to evaluate it.
“You’re saying, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this’ when I know a good chunk of them do this,” Harris said.
Employers are often focusing too hard on finding the perfect candidate and losing some of the most adaptable ones in the process, he said. And while he still tries to stand out by sending his resumé via mail, he says using AI to quickly tailor his resumé makes it easier to be among some of the earlier applicants.
Job seekers say one of the benefits of AI is it can help people make ideas flow better, punch up their words, and fill in blanks they may struggle with. But some employers say they’d much rather see the person as they are.
Prateek Singh, founder and CEO of the start-up LearnApp in New Delhi, said that when candidates use AI for their applications, it doesn’t allow him to evaluate what excites them about the joband what they’re less interested in. In their cover letters, candidates are asking himto “chat over coffee,” a phrase he said isn’t common in India.
“This is the best time for you to stand out based on all of your flaws and eccentricity,” he said. “If 100 applicants come to us with AI, and you are authentic, you stand out.”
The advice rings true to applicants such as Sneha Sharma, who said that when she stopped using AI for her resumé, she started to gain more traction in her job search.
In the course of about six months she had applied to up to 300 jobs, using AI tools such as ChatGPT and some that helped her find leads. She briefly tried an AI application that auto-applied to jobs for her but gave up on that in a couple weeks. But she couldn’t land any interviews.
After taking a break, she adopted a new approach: She stopped using AI, built a couple of resumés from scratch, adding a little personality such as including details about her move to the United States, and cold calling and emailing recruiters. Within two weeks she landed seven interviews, and in less than two months, she had a job.
“Don’t be blinded by the internet and that ChatGPT will do everything,” she said. “Use your brain, keep changing and experimenting.”
Wallaert, the Oceans executive, said the company planned to reach back out to qualified candidates who used AI to tell them to try again. The company also plans on updating the application’s instructions to ask that candidates not use AI for their video response. Wallaert has faith that eventually the problem will solve itself, but in the meantime, he feels badly for candidates who may lose out because of relying too much on AI.
“This gap will close over time but at what cost?” he said. “That’s the bummer.”
LONDON — America and Israel’s attack on Iran disrupted flights across the Middle East and beyond Saturday as countries around the region closed their airspace and three of the key airports that connect Europe, Africa, and the West to Asia halted operations.
Hundreds of thousands of travelers were either stranded or diverted to other airports after Israel, Qatar, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain closed their airspace. There also was no flight activity over the United Arab Emirates, flight tracking website FlightRadar24 said, after the government there announced a “temporary and partial closure” of its airspace.
That led to the closure of key hub airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, and the cancellation of more than 1,800 flights by major Middle Eastern airlines. The three major airlines that operate at those airports — Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad — typically have about 90,000 passengers per day crossing through those hubs and even more travelers headed to destinations in the Middle East, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
Then later on Saturday officials at Dubai International Airport — the largest in the United Arab Emirates and one of the busiest in the world — said four people were injured as the Emirates condemned what it called a “blatant attack involving Iranian ballistic missiles.” Strikes were also reported at other commercial airports in the region, including Kuwait International.
“For travelers, there’s no way to sugarcoat this,” said Henry Harteveldt, an airline industry analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group. “You should prepare for delays or cancellations for the next few days as these attacks evolve and hopefully end.”
Airlines that are crossing the Middle East will have to reroute flights around the conflict with many flights headed south over Saudi Arabia. That will add hours to those flights and consume additional fuel, adding to the costs airlines will have to absorb. So ticket prices could quickly start to increase if the conflict lingers.
The added flights will also put pressure on air traffic controllers in Saudi Arabia who might have to slow traffic to make sure they can handle it safely. And the countries that closed their airspace will miss out on the overflight fees airlines pay for crossing overhead.
But Mike McCormick, who used to oversee air traffic control for the Federal Aviation Administration before he retired and is now a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said over the next few days these countries might be able to reopen parts of their airspace once American and Israeli officials share with the airlines where military flights are operating and how capable Iran remains of firing missiles.
“Those countries then will be able to go through and say, OK, we can reopen this portion of our space but we’ll keep this portion of our airspace closed,” McCormick said. “So I think what we’ll see in the next 24 to 36 hours how the use of airspace evolves as the kinetic activity gets more well defined and as the capability of Iran to actually shoot missiles and create additional risk is diminished due to the attacks.”
But it is unclear how long the disruption to flight operations could last. For comparison, the Israeli and U.S. attack on Iran in June 2025 lasted 12 days.
‘No one knows’
The situation was changing quickly and airlines urged passengers to check their flight status online before heading to the airport.
Some airlines issued waivers to affected travelers that will allow them to rebook their flight plans without paying extra fees or higher fares.
Jonathan Escott and his fiancé had arrived at the airport in Newcastle, England, on Saturday only to find out that his direct flight to Dubai on Emirates airline was canceled, leaving everyone on the flight stuck there.
Escott left to go back to where he was staying with family, about an hour from the airport, but has no idea when he may be able to travel.
“No one knows,” Escott said. “No one really knows what’s going on with the conflict, really. Not Emirates, Emirates don’t have a clue. No one has a clue.”
At least 145 planes that were en route to cities like Tel Aviv and Dubai early Saturday were diverted to airports in cities like Athens, Istanbul, or Rome, according to FlightAware. Others turned around and returned to where they had taken off. One plane spent nearly 15 hours in the air after leaving Philadelphia and getting all the way to Spain before turning around and returning to where it started.
Numerous airlines canceled international flights to Dubai through the weekend, as India’s civil aviation agency designated much of the Middle East — including skies above Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon — as a high security risk zone at all altitudes.
Air India canceled all flights to Mideast destinations. Turkish Airlines said flights to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Jordan were suspended until Monday and flights to Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman were suspended.
The airline said additional cancellations may be announced, and many other airlines were suspending flights into the region through the weekend.
Travelers advised to be ‘very creative’
U.S.-based Delta Air Lines and United Airlines suspended flights to Tel Aviv at least through the weekend. Dutch airline KLM had already announced earlier in the week that it was suspending flights to and from Tel Aviv.
Airlines including Lufthansa, Air France, Transavia, and Pegasus canceled all flights to Lebanon, while American Airlines suspended flights from Philadelphia to Doha.
Virgin Atlantic said it would avoid flying over Iraq, meaning flights to and from India, the Maldives, and Riyadh could take slightly longer. The airline already was not flying over Iran and said all flights would carry appropriate fuel in case they need to reroute on short notice.
British Airways said flights to Tel Aviv and Bahrain will be suspended until next week, and flights to Amman, Jordan, were canceled Saturday.
“Travelers should anticipate that there will be a lot of disruptions,” Harteveldt said. “To be honest, if you haven’t left home, chances are you won’t be leaving home if you’re supposed to travel to or through these destinations for at least several days, if not longer. And if you are returning home, you will have to be very creative about how you get home.”
Standing on the U.S. Embassy roof as tanks rumbled toward Saigon and gunfire rang out below, Juan Valdez wondered if he and his fellow Marines might have actually been forgotten.
Working through the night, as a mob of desperate people pressed against the compound’s gates and spilled over its walls, he had helped evacuate nearly 2,100 Americans and Vietnamese fleeing the collapse of South Vietnam. But after Ambassador Graham Martin was airlifted to safety with the embassy’s American flag, the helicopter evacuation had been canceled — the result of a misunderstanding, as air staff didn’t realize a group of Marines was still waiting to be picked up.
A call for help went out. And Master Sgt. Valdez waited for what “seemed like an eternity” for the last helicopter to arrive.
When it landed, he nearly didn’t make it on board. After telling his 10 fellow Marines to get on, and waiting to ensure they boarded safely, he slipped as he stepped onto the ramp. The helicopter began to take off as one of the Marines, Mike Sullivan, did a head count. They were one man short.
“I remember looking at the ramp, and two hands were over the top of it,” Sullivan recalled in Last Days in Vietnam, an Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary. Master Sgt. Valdez was yanked on board as the chopper departed.
It was 7:58 a.m. on April 30, 1975, just a few hours before the North Vietnamese burst through the gates of the presidential palace, hoisted a Viet Cong flag, and celebrated the end of a war that had lasted 20 years, costing the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and untold Vietnamese.
Master Sgt. Valdez, the last Marine to leave Vietnam, was 88 when he died Feb. 15 in Tucson, Ariz., where he was living. To the leathernecks who served under him, it was only fitting that he was the last of their unit to depart Saigon.
“He was a model leader, always looking after his troops,” said one of those Marines, Doug Potratz. “When I went to his house 40 years after the fall of Saigon, he had all our individual ID pictures on the mantel of his fireplace. He never forgot us.”
“In some ways he was like a dad to us,” said Dave Norman, one of the 11 Marines on the last helicopter out of Saigon. “But in other ways he was like a principal. If you screwed up, you didn’t want to be in the principal’s office.”
Mr. Valdez spent 32 years in the Marine Corps, retiring in 1987 as a master gunnery sergeant. Even then, he remained intimately involved with the Corps, working as a civilian in the housing office of Camp Pendleton, the primary Marine base on the West Coast.
“He was always a Marine, taking care of Marines,” Potratz said.
During his first tour in Vietnam, from 1965 to 1967, Mr. Valdez served as a platoon sergeant in an amphibious assault vehicle unit. He returned to the country in September 1974 as the top noncommissioned officer — affectionately known as “Top” — in the embassy’s Marine security guard detachment, with a commander, Maj. James Kean, who was based out of Hong Kong before being summoned to Saigon.
Following the departure of American combat troops in 1973, the embassy Marines were among the last U.S. service members in Vietnam. “We were there to protect American lives, as well as American property. It was just a day-to-day job,” Mr. Valdez said.
As the North Vietnamese advanced toward the capital, he and Kean played a critical role evacuating Americans and their allies. More than 50,000 people were flown out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base before rocket and artillery fire made the flights unsafe. Some 7,000 others were then airlifted as part of Operation Frequent Wind, the final stage of the evacuation, which the U.S. military later called the largest helicopter evacuation in history.
At the embassy, helicopters landed every 10 minutes on the roof or in the parking lot, where Marines chopped down a tamarind tree to expand the makeshift landing zone.
The operation got underway on April 29, 1975, after two of the detachment’s young Marines, Darwin Judge and Charles McMahon, were killed in a predawn rocket attack at Tan Son Nhut. Later that day, Armed Forces Radio delivered a not-so-secret signal to indicate that the airlift was on.
“The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising,” an announcer intoned. Then the station played the holiday song “White Christmas.”
Master Sgt. Valdez and Kean “didn’t pull any punches,” Potratz said in a phone interview. “They got us in the conference room after Judge and McMahon were killed. They said, ‘There are almost 100,000 North Vietnamese surrounding the city. We don’t know if they’re going to evacuate us or not. But if we die, we die like Marines.’ That kind of stuck to us. After that, we stuck together and did the best we could.”
As thousands of people rushed to the embassy, Master Sgt. Valdez and other Marines guarded the perimeter. He later recalled lifting people over the gates, helping them inside the compound before realizing there wouldn’t be enough helicopters to evacuate everyone.
“Please, at least take my children out,” he was told by parents. “I’ll stay, but take my little girl now.”
Those who were allowed into the compound were searched for weapons — guns were thrown into the embassy pool — before being escorted to a helicopter.
According to Kean’s after-action report, some 10,000 people eventually breached the embassy gates. Master Sgt. Valdez and the remaining Marines prepared to be evacuated while locking down the elevators and barricading doors, using fire extinguishers and other equipment to block off the rooftop.
For many, images of the chaotic withdrawal came to symbolize the futility of a war that should never have been prolonged, let alone started.
Mr. Valdez said that the departure was painfully resonant in 2021, when the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ended in chaos and bloodshed. As he saw it, the U.S. had repeated some of the same mistakes in both wars.
“We spent so much money, so many weapons, and so many Marine and Army deaths, and for what?” he asked in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “For what?”
Juan Jose Valdez was born in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 19, 1937. His father was a landscaper, and his mother was a homemaker from Mexico. He enlisted in the Marines in 1955, at age 17.
Mr. Valdez died of pneumonia, said his sons Anthony and Michael Valdez. In addition to his children, survivors include a brother; two sisters; a grandson; and three great-granddaughters.
Late in life, Mr. Valdez participated in frequent reunions with his Vietnam detachment, including in a 2015 trip to Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — where a plaque was dedicated to McMahon and Judge, the last Americans killed in action on the ground in Vietnam. The unit’s surviving members had reconnected in 2000, when they traveled to Judge’s Iowa hometown for a memorial service honoring their fallen comrades.
“For a period I went through survivor guilt,” Mr. Valdez said in prepared remarks for the service. “Why wasn’t it me instead. Why did I, who had been in country longer, and had already served a previous tour in Vietnam, lived and these two men died. There were, and still are, no easy answers.”
But “more than anything else,” he added, “we need one another now. Each of us grieves, and when we grieve together, the healing begins.”
WASHINGTON — Key members of Congress are demanding a swift vote on a war powers resolution that would restrain President Donald Trump’s military attack on Iran unless the administration wins their approval for what they warn is a potentially illegal campaign that risks pulling the United States into a deeper Middle East conflict.
Both the House and Senate, where the president’s Republican Party has a slim majority, had already drafted such resolutions long before the strikes Saturday. Now they are ready to plunge into a rare war powers debate next week that will serve as a referendum on Trump’s decision to go it alone on military action without formal authorization from Congress.
“Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.), a leader in the bipartisan effort. He said the strikes on Iran were “a colossal mistake.”
In the House, Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) are demanding Congress go on record with a public vote on their own bipartisan measure. “Congress must convene on Monday to vote,” Khanna said, “to stop this.”
Massie blasted Trump’s own presidential campaign slogan and said: “This is not ‘America First.’”
But most Republicans, particularly their leaders, welcomed Trump’s move against Iran. Many cited the longtime U.S. adversary’s nuclear programs and missile capabilities as requiring a military response.
“Well done, Mr. President,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). “As I watch and monitor this historic operation, I’m in awe of President Trump’s determination to be a man of peace but at the end of the day, evil’s worst nightmare.”
War powers debate tests Congress
The administration’s decision to launch, with Israel, what appears to be an open-ended joint military operation aimed at changing the government in Tehran is testing the Constitution’s separation of powers in deep and dramatic ways. Nearly two months earlier, Trump ordered U.S. strikes that toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
While presidents have the authority as the commander in chief to conduct certain strategic military operations on their own, the Constitution vests Congress with the power to wage war. Before the Iraq War began in March 2003, Republican President George W. Bush made a monthslong push to secure congressional authorization. No such vote was attempted on Iran, and an earlier Senate effort to halt Trump’s actions after last summer’s strike on Iran failed.
The congressional debate over war powers would mostly be symbolic. Even if a resolution were to pass the narrowly split Congress, Trump likely would veto it and Congress would not have the two-thirds majority needed to overturn that rejection. Congress has often failed to block other U.S. military actions, including in a Senate vote on Venezuela, but the roll calls stand as a public record.
Republican leaders back Trump’s action
The response by House Speaker Mike Johnson reflected the party’s long-standing views. Iran, he said, is facing “the severe consequences of its evil actions.”
Johnson (R., La.) said the leaders of the House and Senate and the respective intelligence committees had been briefed in detail earlier in the week that military action “may become necessary” to protect U.S. troops and citizens in Iran. He said he received updates from Secretary of State Marco Rubio and will stay in “close contact” with Trump and the Defense Department “as this operation proceeds.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) commended Trump “for taking action to thwart these threats.”
Thune said he looked forward to administration officials briefing all senators — a signal that lawmakers are seeking more answers to their questions about Trump’s plans ahead.
Democrats warn strikes are illegal
Many Democrats are calling the operation illegal, saying the Constitution gives Congress alone the power to declare war. To them, the administration has failed to lay out its rationale or plan for the military strikes, and the aftermath.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the president has undertaken “illegal, regime-change war against Iran.”
“This is not making us safer & only damages the US & our interests,” Van Hollen (D., Md.) said in a social media post. “The Senate must immediately vote on the War Powers Resolution to stop it.”
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said while Iran is a “bad actor and must be aggressively confronted” for its human rights abuses and the threat it poses to the U.S. and allies, the administration ”must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.”
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, demanded that Congress be briefed immediately on the administration’s plans.
“Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon but the American people do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East when there are so many problems at home,” he said.
