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Excerpts from The Atlantic:

The administration has laid out a buffet of reasons for Operation Epic Fury — take your pick.

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl

So far, the Trump administration has offered at least 10 separate rationales in just six days.

Let’s start shortly after the first missiles launched early Saturday morning. In an eight-minute address posted soon after to his social-media platform, President Trump outlined a few explanations.

The reason for war, he said, is to eliminate “imminent threats” from the Iranian regime—threats that “directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.” (Let’s call this Rationale No. 1: the imminent threat.)

Also, he said, the objective is to ensure that the regime “can never have a nuclear weapon.” (Rationale No. 2: no nukes.) Also, he added, the objective is to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world.” (Rationale No. 3: halt the militias.) These goals are not incompatible, of course, and all involve degrading Iran’s ability to project force beyond its borders.

But just as he appeared to be wrapping up, Trump floated a major new reason: laying the groundwork for the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach.” In other words, “Take over your government.” (Rationale No. 4: regime change.)

A couple of hours later, Trump said his attention was steadfastly on this last explanation—securing the liberty of the Iranian people from the country’s 47-year theocratic regime. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he told The Washington Post just after 4 a.m.

About half an hour later, another justification was evidently on the commander in chief’s mind: “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” he wrote on Truth Social. The post included a link to a story in a right-wing media outlet purporting to show Iranian election interference. (That seemed enough to constitute Rationale No. 5: election interference, before the sun had even risen over Mar-a-Lago.)

Later on Saturday, Trump revisited his second and third rationales for the strikes in an interview with Axios. He cited the failure of negotiations (led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the real-estate developer turned Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff) to reach a deal to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And he also spoke about his realization, while writing his speech the day before the bombing started, that Iran had a history of violence in the region: “I saw that every month they did something bad, blew something up or killed someone.”

By Saturday afternoon, though, the president was ready to unveil his most ambitious rationale yet. As reports filtered in about the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Trump took to social media again to declare that the operation would continue “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” (Rationale No. 6: world peace, an appropriately grand finale for launch day.)

On sunday morning, Trump was back to Rationale No. 2, preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons—with little time to spare, apparently. “If we didn’t do that, they would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks,” the president told Fox News, citing a time frame he had not included in his initial remarks. The same morning, the president told NBC News that the reason for the launch was simple: “They weren’t willing to say they will not have a nuclear weapon.”

For context: The White House had announced last June that Iranian nuclear facilities had been obliterated and “suggestions otherwise are fake news.”

Shortly after, a prerecorded announcement appeared on Truth Social in which the president emphasized that “combat operations” will be ongoing “until all of our objectives are achieved.” The explanation built on the global-peace idea of Rationale 6 with a look to the future: “We’re undertaking this massive operation not merely to ensure security of our own time and place, but for our children, and their children, just as our ancestors have done for us many, many years ago,” the president said. (Rationale No. 7: for the grandkids.)

That seemed like the kind of rousing, big-picture finish on which the president might have ended day two of combat operations. But he wasn’t done. In an interview that night with ABC News, Trump hinted at another reason—self-preservation. “I got him before he got me,” he said, presumably a reference to Khamenei. The Justice Department has brought charges in two cases of alleged Iranian murder-for-hire plots, and a man allegedly backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is now on trial in New York, accused of a scheme to assassinate Trump. “I got him first,” the president said. (Rationale No. 8: preemptive hit.)

As the new week began, another rationale was percolating lower down the chain of command. At a Monday briefing, a combat-unit commander told officers that the war is part of God’s plan and that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a noncommissioned officer circulated by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group. (Rationale No. 9: fulfill God’s purpose.)

But there was more. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, searching for an imminent threat that would have justified bypassing congressional approval, implied that Israel had forced the Pentagon’s hand because assessments showed that “if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked—and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us—we would suffer more casualties.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said more or less the same: “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the U.S.,” the administration had a “very difficult decision” to make (Rationale No. 10: The Israelis made me do it).

That one, however, lasted barely a day. Trump, on Tuesday, said the opposite: “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.” Rubio dutifully walked backhis own remarks, insisting that the decision had been made separate from and prior to Israel’s. “The president systemically—made a decision to systematically destroy this terroristic capability,” Rubio said. “I was very clear in that answer.” (Rationale No. 3, it seems.)

Wednesday brought us full circle: Trump ordered the strikes because he felt (yes, felt) that Iran might attack the U.S., a.k.a. the imminent threat, Rationale No. 1.

Hegseth, meanwhile, included in his Wednesday briefing—among many other objectives—a reference to Rationale No. 8, assassinating the Iranian leaders alleged to have threatened the president’s life. (This, by the way, is connected to Rationale No. 5 on election interference.)

Speaking at a roundtable with tech-industry leaders the same day, the president returned to Rationale No. 2, on nukes: “If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon,” he said, repeating a claim for which neither the Pentagon nor the intelligence community has provided any evidence. He added a dash of change-of-government thinking (Rationale No. 4) but with the Caracas model in mind, rather than the toppling of the Iranian regime. “Venezuela worked out really great,” he said. “We have a wonderful relationship with the president.”

Those most interested in a more robust Rationale No. 4—actual regime change—needed to wait less than 24 hours. Yesterday morning, The Washington Post reported that, in calls with Kurdish minority leaders in Iran and Iraq, the president offered “extensive U.S. aircover” and other backing for Kurdish forces to take over parts of western Iran. But that needs to be considered alongside what Trump told Axios the same day: that he must be involved in the selection of Iran’s next leader, modeling that process on his experience with Venezuela. “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela,” he said. Later Thursday, the White House went back to relying on Rationale No. 8, posting a clip on X showing Trump saying, “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.”

If you can’t figure out why we are at war, maybe (according to the administration) the problem is your own inability to understand. Hegseth said Monday that the administration was “very clear-eyed” and would avoid “the foolish policies of the past” that lacked goals “tethered to actual, clear objectives.”

On Wednesday, the White House on X said much the same: “Our objectives are clear. We will not stop until they are achieved.”