President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was only hours old, and already the plan had gone awry.
Spurred by fresh intelligence that the country’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was meeting with his top officials on the morning of February 28, the US and Israel had accelerated plans for an attack in hopes of wiping out the regime’s senior leadership all at once.
If it worked, officials calculated, the resulting power vacuum could be filled by a slate of lower-tier leaders they hoped would be open to ushering in a more US-friendly era in Iran.
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