Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine may not know what America’s doing in Iran, but Donald Trump does.
“Our objectives are clear,” Trump said Monday at The White House, a few hours after Hegseth berated reporters for having the audacity to ask the Secretary of War if there’s a rationale or a time line for “Operation Epic Fury.”
In his own comparatively calm remarks, Trump said there are four overarching goals. The first is eliminating Iran’s ballistic missile program. That’s going well, apparently, and forgetting that Iran fired a lot of missiles over the past 48 hours. (“Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”)
The second goal’s “annihilating” the IRGC’s navy. That too’s going pretty well, Trump said, noting that 10 ships “are at the bottom of the sea” already.
Third, Trump’s doing the world a service by preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Never mind that he supposedly checked that box last summer with “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
Lastly, the US military’s ending, once and for all, the regime’s capacity to field, train and coordinate proxies in the region.
None of that’s new. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all had the same goals, they just reckoned all-out war might not be the best way to achieve them.
In fairness to Trump, every other approach generally failed, the JCPOA notwithstanding. The question’s whether diplomacy had in fact “reached its natural end,” as JD Vance put it last week. Or whether this is just an example of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu kicking Tehran while it’s down.
Trump partially answered that question on Monday, even if he didn’t mean to. “This was our last best chance to… eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime,” he said.
Although he echoed Hegseth and Caine in conceding that combat operations could go on for quite a while if they have to, Trump reiterated that the original time line was four or five weeks, and said the operation’s ahead of schedule.
“We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership and that was done in about an hour,” he mused. “So we’re ahead of schedule there by a lot.”
As ever with Trump, you don’t know whether to laugh, sigh despairingly or both.
Come on… “Epic Fury”!? There has got to be a Trump Media XBox/ Playstation video game release coming soon…
I really appreciate these snapshots of what is going on over there. I am tempted to adorn them with cute comments, which in the end only really entertain me. This is a serious matter that deserves serious analysis, and your knowledge of the historical and geographic implications is really invaluable.
The parallels to the invasion of Iraq are uncanny. At least, I can finally dust off all those old Arrested Development references.
Trump in 8 months: I’ve made a huge mistake.
Soon to be followed by one of the Trump children talking about their crypto schemes: “I may have committed some light treason.”
I somehow doubt he’s ever said those words in his life.
Maybe in someone’s dream…
True, more likely that America will be saying that.
Orange you glad banana republic man didn’t say “in about 2 weeks?”
This should be done by mid-March- in time for the F-1 races in Bahrain (April 10) and Saudi Arabia (April 17) to proceed, as scheduled. 🙂
Bingo!
Looks the US may start escorting tankers.
I got an e-mail today from Chase bank thanking me for opening a new credit card account. I didn’t open a new credit card account, so I logged-in to my old Chase account only to discover their website was down. I was able to phone their customer service, and a very nice woman there assured me that everything was fine with my account, and that the e-mail i received was a” known issue.”
Sometime later my wife could not log-in to her bank account as their website was down. I then discovered a news article explaining that U.S. banks and financial services were on “high alert” for fear of Iranian cyber-attacks, so there’s that. I just thought I would share in case others encounter something similar today.