Washington, March 2 (.) Reiterating his call to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, US President Donald Trump has said that he is mulling a boots-on-the-ground approach for the Islamic Republic to prevent the regime’s covert designs for obtaining nukes, something which Tehran has repeatedly denied.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground. Like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.
“I say, ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.'”
When asked on the timeline for the operation in Iran, Trump told New York Post that it was “going to go pretty quickly,” adding “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of [Iranian] leadership – 49 killed – and that was, you know, going to take, we figured at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
The president also rebuffed opinion polls that show many Americans disapprove of his decision to launch US strikes on Iran, arguing “I have to do the right thing.”
While a majority of the US public, as per polls, have favoured direct military action in Iran before the development of nukes, a considerable minority has opted either for neutrality, or said that Washington should use its economic muscle to compel Tehran to bow down, rather than deploy troops.
Earlier Monday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, acknowledging the whole affair to be a long one, said that Washington’s objectives in Iran could admittedly “take some time to achieve.”
Giving similar statements to the New York Times, and the Daily Mail on Sunday, Trump predicted that the war would at least last four to five weeks, if not more, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday noting the president had “all the latitude in the world” to discuss a timeline.
“It could move up. It could move back,” he said.
Prior to awarding the Medal of Honour to three US soldiers – two of them posthumously – for their role in the Iran war, Trump declared, “This was our last best chance to strike, what we’re doing right now, and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.”
Claiming that Tehran’s ballistic weapons programme was growing “rapidly and dramatically,” which he said posed a threat to American forces overseas, Trump said the Islamic Republic already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and US military bases abroad, and would soon have missiles capable of hitting Washington.
“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people,” he said. “Our country itself would be under threat.” . . .