ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Will the U.S. get involved in the deadly fighting between Israel and Iran? Earlier today, President Trump refused to rule it out.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven't made a final - I like to make the final decision one second before it's due, you know, 'cause things change, I mean, especially with war.
SHAPIRO: One of the central questions here is how close Iran is to having a nuclear weapon. Trump has dismissed his own spy chief's assessment about the threat. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, but on Air Force One yesterday, Trump said, I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.
The president's insistence that a hostile country is building a weapon of mass destruction echoes the case another president made more than 20 years ago, when George W. Bush argued in 2002 that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction.
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GEORGE W BUSH: It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.
SHAPIRO: Those claims turned out to be inaccurate. No such stockpiles were found after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll covered that war, and his latest book is "The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., And The Origins Of America's Invasion Of Iraq." Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
STEVE COLL: Thanks, Ari. Glad to be here.
SHAPIRO: U.S. intelligence has been catastrophically wrong before on the status of a Middle Eastern country's nuclear ambitions and program. So as someone who covered the drumbeat to the war in Iraq in 2003, how are you thinking about this moment with Iran?
COLL: Well, there are echoes and there are differences. Let's maybe start with the differences. There's a much deeper public and agreed body of evidence about Iran's nuclear capabilities. They have the ability to enrich and are, in fact, enriching uranium to levels that could be used, with a little bit of tweaking, for a bomb. Everybody agrees about that. The question is their intention, and here, intelligence gets a little bit murkier, but that is a difference from Iraq. In the case of Iraq, there was no evidence publicly available, despite intrusive inspections, that the Iraqis were carrying out active nuclear bomb work. It was only the assertion of intelligence analysts that they were.
SHAPIRO: And so if the available intelligence is one key difference, what do you see as the key similarities?
COLL: Well, some of it is the political use of intelligence to justify a war, to articulate to publics and democratic societies, whether in Israel or in the United States, that, oh, we've got evidence that justifies this preemptive attack. You're going to have to trust us. That sounds similar. Even though we can see, in the case of Iran, a much clearer and longer explicit nuclear program, nonetheless, the threshold decision to attack is based on intelligence, so that's similar. And there's a second similarity that struck me over the last few days in particular, which is the disconnection between war aims and credible means to achieve those aims.
SHAPIRO: What do you mean by that? What is the aim here? And I take it you think the credible means are not available?
COLL: Yeah, well, let's start with the question. What are those aims? It's not clear. Israel has acted preemptively to stop Iran from breaking out and building a weapon at an unacceptable pace, and that was the first and remains an important part of Israel's explanation for why it had to attack. At the same time, Prime Minister Netanyahu has talked about regime change, has called upon the Iranian people to take matters into their own hands - a call that echoes one that George H.W. Bush made in early 1991, when he called on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. And that didn't end well because the aim of fomenting an internal rebellion was not matched by any ability of the United States to support the rebels. Here, too, no one is expecting the United States or Israel to launch a ground invasion of Iran and topple its governments, and yet there's talk - loose talk about regime change as the goal of the entire operation.
SHAPIRO: What do you make of the disconnect between Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard saying, Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and President Trump apparently deciding he knows differently?
COLL: Well, it sounds like Director Gabbard is articulating a judgment that has been publicized in the recent past - a judgment of American intelligence that Iran has not made an explicit decision to go all the way towards building a weapon. It sounds as if Israel is reporting that their intelligence is of a different character. And this seems to explain the gap between the president and his director of national intelligence. Miss Gabbard is reporting what we understand to have been a long-standing U.S. judgment, and the president may be listening to his allies in Tel Aviv who are telling him, well, you got to get up to date with what we've learned.
SHAPIRO: In the run-up to the Iraq War, Secretary of State Colin Powell famously told President Bush that what he called the Pottery Barn rule applied in the war - if you break it, you own it. Do you think that principle is relevant here?
COLL: Well, the Iraq War, after all, was a ground invasion, so once American forces reached Baghdad and chased Saddam Hussein out of his palace, they were the occupying power and they owned the country, and we all remember the unhappy result that unfolded, I think. The analogy here is probably closer to the intervention in Libya because that was just a bombing campaign. It was undertaken for limited purposes, but it set off a chain reaction that neither President Obama, who ordered American participation, nor many of the other allies in Europe and the Arab world who participated in the intervention could foresee. It resulted in a very complex civil war that's in some ways still going on today, more than a decade later. So these kinds of interventions may start out with limited aims, but our recent experience in the Middle East and elsewhere is that they don't always end there.
SHAPIRO: Do you think an off-ramp is likely, or does the momentum seem to be moving in the wrong direction?
COLL: I think the key question for me now is what is President Trump going to decide to do? Israel is managing its own foreign policy. They have, since the October 7 attacks, been quite forceful in taking their own security into their own hands. They've done that here. That's one path that the United States can't control. I think that's been demonstrated. What it can control is its own intervention and how far it goes. And I think we're - as the president said today, nobody knows what I'm going to do, and that sounds like that includes himself.
SHAPIRO: That's journalist Steve Coll, who's now with The Economist. Thank you.
COLL: Thanks, Ari. Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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