Netanyahu urged Trump to strike Iran, ex-defense chief suggests in censored book

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WASHINGTON – Redacted quotes in a new book by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper imply that Benjamin Netanyahu pressured U.S. President Donald Trump to take explicit military action against Iran’s nuclear program.

The redacted sections address escalating U.S.-Iran tensions during Trump’s presidency, which were sparked by Iran’s September 2019 drone attack on a Saudi petroleum refinery.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper listens as former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in Washington, in April 2019.SAUL LOEB / AFP

While Esper notes that Trump seemed firm in his commitment not to enter a war with Iran, he writes, “The president often had others in the room, and foreign leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him [REDACTED].”

The U.S. Department of Defense has notably prohibited sections of Esper’s book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times,” from publication. Esper is currently suing the Pentagon, charging that “significant text is being improperly withheld from publication … under the guise of classification.”

Following a redacted quote that implies Netanyahu urged Trump to take military action, Esper writes: “Netanyahu would say this to me when I met with him, so I was confident he was telling Trump the same thing,” Esper continues.

“In my view, that seemed like a big bet to take, especially when there wasn’t a pressing need to take it anytime soon,” Esper notes, and more redacted text follows. He continues citing Israeli media reports and Israeli defense officials briefing their superiors that Iran was still two years away from assembling a nuclear weapon despite its progress.

According to a book by journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, excerpts from which appeared in the New Yorker in July, Netanyahu implored the Trump administration to attack Iran, from the moment it was clear that the election results had gone against Trump. Milley is quoted as saying: “If you do this, you’re gonna have a fucking war.”

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Esper’s book details his nearly 16-month tenure running the Pentagon, which saw tensions between the U.S. and Iran reach near boiling points several times, most notably with the January 2020 assassination of Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps General Qassem Soleimani.

The book highlights several moments in the months leading up to the assassination when Trump advisers advocate for action against Iran. “There was still a palpable sense that too many around the table wanted to strike Iran,” Esper writes.

Esper notes in his book that other officials in the Trump White House who also seemed to be pushing for military action against Iran. Esper writes that in a July 2020 meeting, several months after the assassination of Soleimani, then National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien was “pushing for [REDACTED] and military action. He also notes that former Vice President Mike Pence was “subtly leaning in behind him, also seeming to support some type of action.”

While the U.S. intelligence community did not support rushed action, Esper writes that O’Brien claimed “the president has an appetite to do something.”

Several weeks later, Esper claims, O’Brien pushed to “strike a senior Iranian military officer who was operating outside of Iran.” While he acknowledges this person had been stirring trouble in the region, Esper posits: “Why now? What was new? Was there an imminent threat?”

He adds that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley sensed that this was a ploy aimed at Trump’s reelection. “This was a really bad idea with very big consequences,” Esper writes.

Esper says that he refused to carry out such an action without a written order from Trump. “There was no way I was going to unilaterally take such an action — particularly one fraught with a range of legal, diplomatic, political and military implications, not to mention that it could plunge us into war with Iran,” he writes.

Esper noted that O’Brien’s proposed strike on the Iranian officer was “the last time something involving Iran seriously came up before the election.” Trump tweeted shortly after, however, that “any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”

Trump fired Esper in November 2020, days after the election, following months of escalating tensions between the two surrounding the deployment of active-service troops within the U.S. to combat Black Lives Matter protesters.