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The Trump administration has given no indication that it has planned for the aftermath of its military campaign in Iran, a top senator briefed on the war aims has warned.
“I have never had, from any of the briefings, any description of what phase two would be,” said Virginia senator Mark Warner in an interview on Wednesday.
As the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, Warner is a member of the “gang of eight”, a select group of congressional leaders who receive high-level intelligence briefings on major national security matters.
His warning comes against the backdrop of a widening war, as Iran and its proxy groups in the Middle East have rained down hundreds of missiles and drones on Israel and Gulf states, targeting US embassies and military bases, energy infrastructure and hotels in retaliation for an expansive bombing campaign by the US and Israel.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe briefed the group — which includes lawmakers from both chambers of Congress and both political parties — three days before Donald Trump ordered the start of the US war on Iran. Rubio, who was previously the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, called each member of the gang of eight again shortly after the assault began in the early hours of Saturday.
Before an Israeli bomb killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, the US intelligence community had spent years contemplating what would take his place if he or the Iranian regime fell, Warner said.
“We’ve been asking for years, including Marco when he was on the committee: ‘OK, if they’re gone, who’s next?’” Warner said of the future shape of the Iranian regime. “And the general sense was: it could be worse.”
An effort by Democratic lawmakers to stop Trump from taking further military action in Iran without congressional approval failed in the Senate on Wednesday, after all but one Republican senator voted against a war powers resolution intended to rein in the president’s power.
But Republicans on Capitol Hill have also privately expressed scepticism about the administration’s decision-making and questioned whether the White House sufficiently contemplated an endgame or anticipated the repercussions of the fight they started.
“If we bomb, disrupt and exit, there is no telling what could happen over the course of the summer,” said one Republican member of Congress, who added they were “worried” about a possible “doomsday” scenario of retaliation from Tehran and its proxies.
“I don’t know that the administration could have possibly thought it through,” the lawmaker said.
The five-day war has brought the shipping route to the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz to a near-standstill and severely disrupted air traffic in the region. The onslaught of Iranian missiles and drones in nearby countries has meanwhile spurred the US to urge the evacuation of its citizens from the entire region, with limited means available to them.
Trump had initially threatened to attack Iran in January, to bring “help” to nationwide protesters there, as the regime cracked down on nationwide demonstrations and killed thousands of people. A day into the aerial bombardment this week, Trump announced that he had fulfilled that promise.
Even if the intensive bombing of Iran kills most of the regime leadership, analysts say a regime change via aerial bombardment is unlikely to succeed and impossible to control.
Consecutive US administrations have maintained only a weak understanding of the alternative powers inside Iran, where the regime has brutally suppressed its opposition for decades.
“One of the concerns that we’ve had is not having a lot of visibility into the Iranian resistance,” Warner said. The US has had “to rely on our Israeli allies” for that intelligence. And while some of Washington’s European allies have maintained diplomatic missions in Iran, and valuable insights into the country’s internal dynamics, “I’m not sure how much of that is being fully shared” with the Trump administration at this point, Warner said.
Administration officials have said in recent days that their objectives are to destroy what might remain of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and their ballistic missile stockpiles and to prevent the regime from threatening other countries, whether by weapons or by proxy groups. But lawmakers are unsure how the administration will measure that.
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth has said repeatedly that the US and Israel “will have complete dominance of the skies”, said Warner. “Does that mean bombing them back to the Stone Age? Is this taking out all command and control? Is it taking out the grid and utility system? I don’t know.”
Warner is quick to assert that he is “as firm a supporter of Israel as anybody on the Democratic side”.
“The [assassinated] supreme leader [Ali Khamenei] is a bad guy. I’m not going to shed any tears,” Warner added. And Khamenei was “obsessed” with Iran’s nuclear programme. But the irony “is that he was the person that was restraining any kind of weaponisation”, Warner said.
Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday that the military operation has no fixed timeline and no predictable end date. “You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three,” he said at a news conference. “Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo.”
Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington