On Friday morning, an American drone strike ordered by President Trump killed Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force—a division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (I.R.G.C.)—and the most infamous and feared commander in the region. In response, the Iranian government vowed retaliation against the United States, while the Pentagon announced that more troops would be sent to the Middle East. In Congress, the reaction was mixed. Republicans lined up behind the President, while Democrats generally applauded Suleimani’s death but expressed concerns about the Administration’s Middle East strategy, which has included attempts to isolate Iran and the withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran that was brokered by the Obama Administration.

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A day after the strike, I spoke by phone with Representative Elissa Slotkin, a first-term Democrat from Michigan who is also a former C.I.A. analyst and Defense Department official with experience serving in Iraq. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what she learned on the ground in Iraq, whether Congress will take action to assert legislative authority over military action and foreign policy, and why Trump has made her rethink her views on how America should conduct itself abroad.

You wrote a long Twitter thread on Friday in which you explained that the Bush and Obama Administrations decided that taking out Suleimani would not be worth the potential costs. Can you talk more about how much this was discussed? Did it ever come close to occurring?

Well, listen, I think we have to make clear that we’re talking about the Quds Force more generally, as well as Suleimani. He was the head of a very capable organization, and that organization has really helped destabilize major parts of the Middle East over the span of my career, from 2003 until today. Both the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration had countless, regular discussions, especially for those who covered the Middle East, on how we would counter the Quds Force. We had more limited conversations about how to deal with Suleimani. In particular, when sanctions were levied against him, those were always long conversations. To be honest with you, in the conversations we had on pushing back on him in particular and the organization generally, we almost never spent a ton of time on the possible assassination, because there are legal and political and military implications to it. And, whenever we did have conversations on exposing him or pushing back on him or doing things short of assassination that would impact him, you had to acknowledge that there would be a strong reaction, because his star was on the rise, people definitely knew his name, and he sort of had a celebrity status in Iran. But there were legal and political and military implications to the actions that took place, and those things were always at the forefront of any conversation we had about him.

Who do you mean when you say “we”?

Sometimes the conversations—and, again, this is not on assassination, this is on mitigating the Quds Force—sometimes you would have a theoretical conversation among C.I.A. analysts who covered Iran and Shia militias. Later in my career, it was about how you thwart their influence in Iraq, and we would have that conversation at the Pentagon, at the State Department, and then at the National Security Council, as a group. And that took place in both the Obama and Bush Administrations. And, as I got more senior, those conversations happened at more and more senior levels.

You referred to yourself as a “Shia-militia analyst.” Can you talk more about Suleimani’s role in the region, and his importance to Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon?

Yeah, certainly as an Iraqi Shia-militia expert, I cannot think of the rise of Shia militias without thinking of the rise of Qassem Suleimani. From almost immediately after our invasion, he started building relationships and alliances with some of the most radical Shia groups in Iraq, and systematically provided training, matériel, weapons, logistics, leadership guidance, and advice and counsel to the leadership of those organizations. Many of them sent their top fighters to train in Iran. He trained them to use rockets and mortars and E.F.P.s [explosively formed penetrators], which are some of the most dangerous improvised explosive devices that are armor-penetrating.

These E.F.P.s were responsible for killing American troops in Iraq, yes?

Rockets, mortars, and E.F.P.s were extremely deadly to our troops. I can’t tell you how many times in my three tours in Iraq I had to run for a duck-and-cover bunker because of Iranian rockets coming into the Green Zone. Hundreds of times. A good friend of mine, Stu Wolfer, got killed at the gym in the Green Zone. Suleimani was responsible for training and equipping some of the most dangerous groups in Iraq that have killed American forces, American diplomats, American aid workers, and countless Iraqis.

I interviewed the Shia and Iran expert Vali Nasr on Thursday, and he didn’t differ with anything you said there. But he said that he still saw Suleimani as a pragmatist, in part because of how many connections he had to make around the region. Is that how you or other analysts saw him?

He was very shrewd, he was very cosmopolitan, and he understood traditional conflict, and carrots and sticks thereof. Nothing I told you runs counter to the idea of being a pragmatist. He was very practical in helping to design a strategy that was to inflict pain on U.S. forces in Iraq, so that we would see less and less reason to be there, and then eventually depart. His desire to arm and train those militias was to not only punish the United States but to build Iran’s political power in the capital, and that was successful. That, to me, was extremely shrewd and extremely pragmatic. It is also extremely dark and dangerous.

Did you get much of a sense of his role within the Iranian regime?

I know he was deeply respected. I know that he was given more and more leeway over the span of my career. He was often given top-level strategic guidance, and allowed a lot of creative freedom, but I don’t know much unclassified about his relationship with senior leadership in Iran.

The regime has not shown much ability in the past couple of decades to strike Western targets outside the region. Is that something that you fear could change, and was it a fear when you were an analyst?

Well, now this is all in the public, but there was an attempt by the Iranians to arrange the assassination of a Saudi diplomat not too far from the U.S. Capitol, in Washington. There were these incidents that happened during my time that demonstrated that the Iranians were still pursuing operations, even in North America. But I haven’t been deep in the intelligence since 2017, so I can’t speak about their worldwide network. When I left, while they were still attempting to establish themselves in a bunch of places across the world, their most capable units were in the Middle East.

You have written about the need for the White House to come to Congress to seek authorization for any wider conflict with Iran. Is your sense that Congress actually wants to take some responsibility for military conflict? Or has it been overly willing to allow the executive branch, over the past several decades, to do as it sees fit? Why should people believe anything has changed on that score?

I think that’s fair. I think that Congress, since the vote on the Iraq War, in 2002, I think there has been a feeling by many members who have been here a long time that that was politically problematic for many reasons and many people. And that, in combination with the war on terror, has led to an atrophy in Congress’s oversight role on the issue of war. And while I do think the Administration should come back, particularly if they know they are intending to get into a protracted conflict, or if they accidentally get into a protracted conflict and need more money for those military operations, that, to me, is a signal that we are in something protracted, whether we want it to be or not, and therefore requires an authorization of military force.

But you don’t have a ton of faith that there will be a push for that course by the leadership in the House or the Senate?

You would have to speak with them. Honestly, we haven’t even seen each other for a couple of weeks, so I don’t want to speak for the Speaker.

Whenever I interview Democratic members of Congress, it seems as if they always say that, deep down, a lot of Republicans have concerns about Trump. That’s hard to tell from the public statements this week. Is your sense that there actually are Republicans concerned about this Administration’s plans for the Middle East?

I do think so. I think that there are a number of Republicans, even on my own committees, who express doubts about how deft a hand this Administration really has when it comes to foreign policy. And sometimes they will express that in private, but they don’t express it very much in public. And I think particularly for some of the veterans, those with military experience, they know up close and personal who is going to be fighting this war if we get into an intentional or inadvertent war, and the President has not earned the trust of a lot of us on foreign policy. He has systematically alienated our allies and emboldened our adversaries. And that’s not political; that’s a factual retelling of the last three years of foreign policy.

Does having a President like Trump make you think differently about American foreign policy, even if he hasn’t yet made a single decision as catastrophic as the one to invade Iraq?

You know, honestly, it does. What I have been thinking about a lot lately is that there are a lot of people out there in think tanks and on Twitter who seem to be waiting for Trump to be voted out of office, and then “everything can go back to normal.” And that means on foreign policy. And I think what they are missing is that, after eighteen years of war, the American public is just no longer willing to cede decision-making on foreign policy to Washington élites on both sides of the aisle, who just make decisions without bringing the public along with them. I think the public feels like we haven’t been successful in a lot of our overseas endeavors, and therefore doesn’t trust that we are going to get it right if we do big things abroad. And we have a responsibility to communicate with the public in a different way. And that means there is no going back; there is only the idea that we take President Trump’s Presidency as a moment of change, and that foreign policy and national security should be handled differently thereafter, no matter who is elected.

Aside from how the public sees it, have you, as a person who has worked in this field, felt your own thinking changing in some fundamental way?

Working under the Bush Administration and then the Obama Administration, I realize now, looking back, that a lot of what the President and the White House did was tradition and habit, not law. This President has really exposed what was practiced as a matter of habit, and what is truly required by law. He has pushed the limits of that and, in some cases, exceeded the limits of the law. And that surprised me, frankly. A lot of the things I was trained to do at the Bush White House or the Obama White House, like including Congress in things, or notifying Congress and allies, consulting oversight committees when big decisions had to be made—that was just standard practice. There is nothing legal about it.

So when the norms go, they aren’t there?

Yeah, they are just not there. It sets a new precedent, first and foremost, for other Presidents, which I don’t love. But it also makes me think that maybe we haven’t designed the system as well as it could be designed. The last time we did a major reorganization of the national-security apparatus was 1947. It may be time to rethink how that apparatus works, and what the rules of the road are, because the standards and norms this President has largely ignored.

The Bush White House had Iraq and torture, and the Obama White House also pushed the envelope with executive power. What would you say to someone who asked why you are only talking about changing things fundamentally now?

While I think it is fair to say both Bush and Obama really went as far as they could on executive power, they still largely obeyed the laws. And this President has shown a willingness to ignore the laws in some cases. The difference is that the President has demonstrated a level of erratic behavior that makes it a lot harder to predict what’s happening. It’s not that I just don’t like Twitter; it’s that we have seen it have really difficult consequences with our allies and partners around the world. His decision to pull out of Syria: I understand he is hellbent on getting out. Guess what? You inform the allies you are working with before you start pulling out. You don’t sell out the partners you are working with in real time and make them run for their lives after they have fought and died for you. That is not what I would call thoughtful, consistent, deliberate decision-making—and that is different from Bush and Obama. You may not have liked the decisions they made, but at least they had a process, they had a national-security team that was trying to think of all angles, and were deliberate and communicated what they were doing.