The President is in a bind over Iran’s refusal to give him a quick victory. Thus, in the same 35-minute press conference late Monday afternoon, he painted the war on Iran as “very complete,” possibly ending “soon,” even referring to it as “an excursion,” while simultaneously threatening that the U.S. could, and is willing to, bomb Iran into the stone age if it does not capitulate on his terms.
Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. is “winning very decisively” produced headlines on how Trump might soon declare “we won!” and get out—the advice he is getting from (unnamed) close advisors, according to the Wall Street Journal today. Assertions that the U.S. has wiped out “every single force in Iran” and “taken out the leadership, twice and maybe three times,” in what he said were strikes on over 5,000 targets in Iran to date, buttressed this line of argument.
At the same time, he threatened that “we’ve left some of the most important targets for later… having to do with electricity production and many other things. We’re not looking to do that if we don’t have to, but they’re the kind of things that are very easy to hit, but very devastating if they are hit. We are waiting to see what happens before we hit them,” he raved, but if we do, “it’s going to take many years for them to be rebuilt.”
