Trump's War

THE PRESIDENT'S MASSIVE GAMBLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

- BY ERIC CORTELLESSA

Trump arrives at the White House on March 1, during the conflict's opening weekend

President Donald Trump had just arrived at Mara-Lago on Friday night, Feb. 27, when he got word from U.S. intelligence officials: they believed they had located Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Months had passed since Trump began preparing for the possibility of war with Iran. In recent weeks, he had instructed military officials to draw up operational plans for a joint strike, coordinated closely with Israel. Eight months after bombing three Iranian nuclear sites, he was once again getting edgy about the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. The latest round of negotiations in Geneva had done little to reassure him. Trump was suspicious that Tehran was preparing an attack on American and Israeli targets. Though the U.S. had positioned a carrier strike group in the region, with another on its way, Iranian negotiators showed little urgency to reach a deal, he notes, proposing to meet again in a week with U.S. envoys. "When I heard that," Trump says, "I said, you know, they're going to hit first."

As guests partied on one side of his oceanfront mansion and private club, Trump huddled with top military and intelligence brass on the other, where he made the decision to launch a decapitation strike against the Iranian regime. "We went way early," Trump explains in a March 4 phone call with TIME. "We were going to do it in another week."