Members of Congress swiftly denounced the president’s military action against the Islamic Republic alongside Israel

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Donald Trump’s failure to build a case with the US public for striking Iran and then going ahead apparently after a last-minute alert to Congress’s key national security experts – the so-called “gang of eight” – has fuelled fierce domestic criticism of the military action against the Islamic Republic on Saturday.

Belying the gravity of Saturday’s attacks, the president spent just three minutes of Tuesday’s record-length one hour and 48 minute State of the Union address trying to explain why the need to act against a regime that had been a strategic foe for decades had suddenly become so urgent and whose nuclear facilities he claimed to have “obliterated” in previous strikes last June.