By Matt Spetalnick, Andrea Shalal and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) - With his large-scale attack on Iran, Donald Trump has seized a legacy-defining moment to demonstrate his readiness to exercise raw U.S. military power. But in doing so, he is also taking the biggest foreign policy gamble of his presidency, one fraught with risks and unknowns.
Trump joined with Israel on Saturday to plunge into war with Iran, providing little explanation to the American public for what could become the biggest
U.S. military campaign since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump has pivoted away from a preference for swift, limited operations like last month’s lightning raid in Venezuela to what experts warn could be a more protracted conflict with Iran that risks escalating into a regional conflagration engulfing the oil-rich Middle East.
He has also set out a daunting objective of regime change in Tehran, pushing the idea that air strikes can incite a popular uprising to oust Iran's rulers.
It is an outcome that outside air power has never directly achieved without the involvement of some kind of armed force on the ground, and which most analysts doubt will succeed this time.
"Most Americans will wake up Saturday morning and wonder why we are at war with Iran, what is the goal, and why U.S. bases in the Middle East are under attack," said Daniel Shapiro, a former senior Pentagon official and U.S. ambassador to Israel who is now at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.
Trump's fixation on Iran has emerged as the starkest example yet of how foreign policy, including his expanded use of military might, has topped his agenda in the first 13 months of his second term, often overshadowing domestic issues like the cost of living that public opinion polls show are much higher priorities for most Americans.
His own aides have been privately urging him for weeks to focus more on voters' economic worries, highlighting the political dangers ahead of this November's midterm elections in which Trump's Republican Party is at risk of losing one or both chambers of Congress.
The brief pre-dawn video that Trump posted on his Truth Social platform announcing what the Pentagon has dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” provided only broad reasons for going to war now with a country the U.S. has tussled with for decades while averting all-out hostilities.
He insisted he would end what he said was Tehran’s ballistic missile threat – which most experts say does not pose a threat to the U.S. - and give Iranians a chance to topple their rulers.
Trump said that to accomplish his goals U.S. forces would lay waste to much of Iran's military as well as deny it the ability to have a nuclear weapon. Iran denies that its nuclear program has military aims.
DASHING HOPES FOR DIPLOMACY
Trump’s sudden resort to force, using huge U.S. military assets built up in the region in recent weeks, appeared all but certain to close the door for now on diplomacy with Iran. The latest round of nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday failed to achieve a breakthrough.
Some Trump aides have previously suggested that he might be able to bomb Tehran back to the negotiating table to force deep concessions. Instead, Iran responded on Saturday by launching missiles at U.S. allies Israel and oil-producing Gulf Arab countries.
Trump’s focus in the video on the urgency of the threat posed by Iran’s ballistic and nuclear programs had echoes of the case President George W. Bush made for war against Iraq in 2003, which later turned out to be based on faulty intelligence and false claims.
Trump’s assertion in Tuesday’s State of the Union address that Iran will soon have a missile that can hit the United States is not backed by U.S. intelligence reports, according to sources familiar with the assessments, and experts have also cast doubt on his aides' recent claims of Tehran’s ability to quickly advance its nuclear capabilities.
With Saturday's strikes, Trump, who had originally threatened to strike Iran in January in support of street protesters facing a violent crackdown, also erased all doubt that part of what he seeks now is regime change in Tehran.
But analysts question whether Trump, who has ruled out deploying U.S. troops on the ground, has a strategy that could unseat Iran’s longtime cleric-dominated government, which has proved resilient in the face of crippling sanctions and periodic mass protests.
The first wave of strikes mainly targeted Iranian officials, a source familiar with the matter said. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not in Tehran at the time of the attacks and had been transferred to a secure location, said a source with knowledge of the matter. However, several senior commanders in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and political officials have been killed, an Iranian source close to the establishment said.
Even if the strikes do succeed in eliminating top leaders, that could have the unintended consequences of sowing chaos across a sprawling nation of 93 million or even lead to a military-run government that might be even more intransigent with the West and oppressive to its people, analysts said.
"He wants to change the government," said Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington. "But it’s hard to change the government from the air. It’s hard to change the minds of Iranians through the air."
Tyson Barker, a former senior U.S. official who is now with the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s call for the Iranian people to rise up was also not likely to work.
"They're really exposing these poor Iranian people by saying, 'Stand up and overthrow your government. We got your back'," Barker said.
APPETITE FOR MILITARY RISK
Trump, whose appetite for military operations has grown since the start of his second term, received briefings ahead of the Iran strikes that not only delivered blunt assessments about the risk of major U.S. casualties but also touted the prospect of a shift in the Middle East in favor of U.S. interests, a U.S. official told Reuters.
Trump appears to have been emboldened by U.S. bombing of Iran’s main nuclear facilities in June, which he considered a major success, and the in-and-out raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and has given the U.S. considerable sway over the OPEC country’s vast oil reserves.
He may have forced his own hand with Iran with his frequent threats of military action while building up a huge naval force that he could not sustain indefinitely in the region.
Analysts see Iran as a much tougher, better-armed foe than Venezuela, even though its air defenses and missile capabilities were severely degraded in joint U.S.-Israeli strikes in June.
"Iran is a more formidable military power, and even what the response is right now in the Gulf - they're willing to cross lines that they weren't willing to cross before," said Nicole Grajewski, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit research institute considered pro-Israel and hawkish on Iran, said Tehran is in such a weakened state that it is worth Trump taking the risks to curb Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
Whether or not the Iranian government falls, he said severely degrading Iran's nuclear and missile programs could be a victory for Trump.
(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick, Andrea Shalal and Idrees Ali; additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, writing by Matt SpetalnickEditing by Ross Colvin and Peter Graff)
