On April 10th the New York Times published an article reporting that Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, when pushed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to commit that the Trump administration would not attack Iran under the Authorization to Use Military Force Act (AUMF) which allowed the United States to seek out and destroy Al Qaeda and other extremist groups responsible for the 9/11attacks against American targets, Mr. Pompeo"demurred" adding that he would "prefer to leave that to lawyers."
Mr. Pompeo's testimony adds to the chain of evidence that the Trump administration may be planning to attack Iran. In 2018 National Security Adviser, John Bolton, directed the Pentagon to provide military options to strike Iran (NYT 1/7/19). At a conference in Warsaw, Secretary of State Pompeo told reporters that "You can't achieve peace and stability in the Mid East without confronting Iran" (NYT 2/14/19). Again, before visiting Kuwait, Israel and Lebanon in March, Secretary of State Pompeo said that the top item on his agenda was countering Iranian influence in the region (Reut. 3/20/19). In its issue of April 7, Time magazine ran a lead story about how the Trump administration had designated Iran's Revolutionary Guard a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." Time further reported that this action came after "...a month's long escalation in the administration's rhetoric against Iran, and its support for militia groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen as well as anti-Israel groups in the region and beyond."
Clearly, it was this action by the Trump administration which led the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to question Secretary of State Pompeo about the Trumps administrations plans and warn it about "Sidestepping Congress for a conflict with Iran" (NYT 4/10/19).
The above actions taken by the Trump Administration are ominously similar to those taken by the George W. Bush administration in 2007- 2008. In April 2008, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the same reporter who broke the story about the My Lai massacre, published an article in The New Yorker stating that the Bush administration was planning to attack Iran. Also, in 2008, Esquire magazine published an article that quoted Admiral William Fallon, Commander of U.S. Central Command, all U.S. forces in the Middle East, as saying he was opposed to the use of force against Iran. Admiral Fallon was subsequently summoned to a meeting at the White House and shortly afterwards retired. There was no attack on Iran.
An analysis of the movements of U.S. Aircraft Carriers at that time showed that while it was normal to have two carriers on station in the Northern Arabian Sea to support U.S. forces fighting in Iraq, in late 2007 there were in fact three with a fourth enroute.
In his State Of The Union Address, on January 25, 2019, President Trump declared: "My administration has acted decisively to confront the world's leading state sponsor of terror, the radical regime in Iran. It is a radical regime. They do bad, bad things."
The best, perhaps only way to prevent Trump from attacking Iran is to get the Senate to rescind the AUMF. Do it. NOW.