Tim Naftali: “On Saturday, the United States, in a joint operation with Israel, killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. For the first time in the postwar era, Washington has succeeded in killing a foreign leader—shattering a precedent that had been sustained for decades by a mix of moral, political, and logistical concerns.”

“Fifty years ago, in February 1976, President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which directed that ‘no employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.’ There should be no tears in the democratic world for Khamenei, who for four decades oversaw a repressive state with terroristic tentacles that extended throughout the world. But it is worth looking at why presidents of both political parties have long been wary of the state-sponsored killing of foreign leaders.”

“As an expanding Middle East war entered its fourth day, the Trump administration gave shifting rationales for its decision to attack Iran, even as U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports said they saw no sign the country had posed an imminent threat to the United States,” the Washington Post reports.

“President Donald Trump and his top national security aides, defending a conflict that has tepid public backing and is incurring escalating risks, emphasized Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles rather than its nuclear program as the principal threat. But they provided different descriptions of the danger.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “The main thing I’d want to get across to people about Donald Trump and his administration right now is that however unprepared you might think they are for war, the chances are very good that it’s much worse. Much, much worse.”

“To be sure: We won’t get full confirmation of this until much later. But what I see, and what reporters and experts have told us is happening, is what I’ve been saying since early in Trump’s second presidency: The entire administration has been set up to prevent the president from having to encounter information that makes him uncomfortable or challenges his impulses.”

“And the national security process as it has existed since Harry Truman was president has been at best hollowed out (with subject-matter experts removed from the loop) and at worst isn’t operating at all. What’s replaced it is the president’s impulses, based on whoever he happens to talk to, whatever he happens to see on his favorite cable news shows, or whoever is best at manipulating him.”

Dan Drezner: “The more we learn about Trump’s decision-making process to bomb Iran, the clearer it becomes that there is no real strategy or end goal.”

New York Times: “Emboldened by its partnership with the United States, feeling its own military strength, and sensing the weaknesses of its two fiercest adversaries, Israel is seizing the new war as an opportunity to pursue its own geopolitical agenda.”

“Persian Gulf nations targeted by Iran have, so far, managed to limit the damage by deploying sophisticated U.S.-made air defenses against the hundreds of drones and missiles that have rained on their cities,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“With costly interceptors and radar, all integrated with the U.S. military, the oil-rich Gulf Arab states have fielded some of the most advanced air defenses in the world, despite their small populations and militaries.”

“A crucial variable in this war, however, is whether these monarchies start running out of interceptors before the Iranian regime runs out of projectiles.”

“The State Department closed its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on Tuesday after drone attacks and urged Americans to depart immediately from 14 Middle East countries, as Iran expanded its retaliatory strikes on American targets in the widening regional conflict,” the New York Times reports.

“Israel’s military said it had seized new areas of Lebanon in its conflict with Iran-backed Hezbollah.”

Punchbowl News: “Republicans on Capitol Hill are about to give President Donald Trump a major boost — a green light to conduct a war against Iran without worrying about Congress, at least for now.”

“The House and Senate are on track this week to vote down a pair of bipartisan war power resolutions aimed at limiting Trump’s ability to conduct the Iran campaign. Rank-and-file Republicans are prepared to back Trump, giving them co-ownership of a conflict that’s already unpopular with Americans.”

Susan Glasser: “In the two and a half days since Donald Trump unleashed a new war in the Middle East, the President and his Administration have come up with an astonishing array of different, even contradictory, rationales for the American military attack on Iran.”

“By my count, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few, these include outright regime change, assistance to the oppressed peoples of the Islamic Republic, stripping Iran of ‘the ability to project power outside its borders,’ stopping future Iranian-sponsored terrorist attacks while exacting revenge for past ones, preëmptive action against an imminent Iranian threat to attack U.S. forces, preëmptive action to block Iran from building ballistic missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland, and preëmptive action to stop the Iranian nuclear program that Trump had, as recently as last week, claimed was ‘obliterated.’”

“Many of these explanations are based on false premises; some already seem to have been abandoned.”

Associated Press: Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about its war in Iran.

“The Trump administration, in pressing its case for war with Iran, has made a number of accusations about the regime’s threats to its neighbors, U.S. troops, and even the American homeland itself,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“However, U.S. officials and lawmakers with access to classified information, along with experts who have spent their careers poring over public data and government reports, say the administration’s assertions are incomplete, unsubstantiated, or flat-out wrong.”

“And questions will only intensify as top administration officials brief Congress early this week.”