President Donald Trump appeared to try to pin the blame for the Iran conflict on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Monday.
Speaking at a roundtable event for national military and law enforcement leaders in Memphis, Tennessee, the president said of the circumstances leading up to the launch of Operation Epic Fury on February 28: “I called Pete, I called General [Dan] Caine, I called a lot of our great people – we have a lot of great people – and I said, ‘Let’s talk.’
“‘We’ve got a problem in the Middle East. We have a country, known as Iran, that has for 47 years been just a purveyor of terror and they’re very close to having a nuclear weapon.
“‘We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55 and 60 with no end, or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.’
“And Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up and you said, ‘Let’s do it because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’ So we are now having really good discussions. They started last, er, night, a little bit, the night before that…”
The president’s claim earlier in the day that members of his administration had held “very good and productive” ceasefire talks with Tehran was dismissed by the Iranian regime, in ironically Trumpian terms, as “fake news.”
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, said: “No negotiations have been held with the U.S., and fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”
Asked about Iran’s denial, the president said before boarding Air Force One: “Well, they’re going to have to get themselves better public relations people. We’ve had very strong talks. Mr [Steve] Witkoff and [Jared] Kushner had them. They went perfectly.”
Iran responded by launching a fresh wave of missile strikes on America and Israel’s allies across the Gulf Monday evening, triggering air raid sirens in Tel Aviv and beyond and serving as a further challenge to Trump’s resolve.
The administration has given a variety of different justifications for its decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran, including claiming that Tehran had resumed attempts to build a nuclear bomb and posed an imminent threat to the U.S., despite Trump claiming to have “obliterated” their capabilities with targeted strikes during last summer’s Operation Midnight Hammer.
The strikes did succeed in their primary objective by killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the operation, ending his 47-year reign as supreme leader.
However, the hostilities have led to retaliatory strikes on targets across the region, the killing of 13 U.S. service members to date, and soaring global fuel prices after Tehran placed a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil is shipped.
Before arriving in Memphis Monday, Trump claimed the U.S. could not have anticipated Iran’s response to the strikes, telling reporters: “Look at the way Iran attacked unexpectedly all of those countries surrounding them. That was not supposed to – nobody was even thinking about it.”
But Reuters has previously reported that the president was warned that precisely that could happen should he attack.
For his part, Hegseth has become the public face of the conflict, delivering aggressive rhetoric from his lectern in the Pentagon briefing room, boasting about U.S. “lethality” and rebuking journalists for being insufficiently positive in their coverage of the devastation.
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