US President Donald Trump has given the American people a short list of his goals for attacking Iran, but when it comes to the reasons for starting the war and how the conflict is expected to unfold, he and his team are sending mixed messages.
“We’re going to win easily,” Trump said Monday at the White House during the military’s Medal of Honor ceremony.
Moments later, the president suggested he was willing to keep US troops fighting if it didn’t end soon.
“We estimated four to five weeks, but we have the ability to go longer than that,” Trump said. “Whatever time, that’s fine. Whatever it takes.”
With the conflict still in its early days, two polls taken after the airstrikes began suggest Trump still has a lot of work to do to sell the American people.
Reuters poll made by Polling firm Ipsos found only 27 percent of American respondents said they approved of strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, 43 percent said they disagree and the rest are not sure. The online survey was conducted Saturday and Sunday with 1,282 US adults from a nationally representative panel.
US President Donald Trump said that although military cooperation with Israel was initially thought to last four to five weeks, it could go on ‘much longer than that.’
CNN poll made by polling company SSRS found that 41 percent of respondents approved the decision to take military action against Iran, while 59 percent disapproved. The survey was conducted via text message with 1,004 adults from a nationally representative panel.
The battle comes with a drop in Trump’s approval rating, as crucial November mid-term elections that will determine control of Congress approach.
Political risk for Trump
Wars that face a clear threat to the US, in the past, have often created a flag-circling effect that has boosted the president’s political fortunes.
However, polls suggest that it is not clear that the Iran war has such an effect on Trump, even in the short term. If the conflict escalates in the spring, all bets are off – especially for the incumbent president who has pledged not to start new wars.
Republican strategist Jason Roe says that for Trump, the political risk of war depends directly on its outcome.
“If we dismantle Iran without a terrorist attack on America or harm to allies in the region, it will be a political victory for Trump,” Roe said. he told Politico on the weekend.
Canada’s last head of mission in Iran Dennis Horak, lawyer and human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz and University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau discuss the change in US President Donald Trump’s comments about his fate in Iran, and the possibility of regime change after the US-Israeli strikes killed Iran’s top leader on Saturday.
“If this continues to be a long-term conflict, or if there are soldiers on the ground, it will be a crime,” he said.
Debate is escalating over how long the conflict can last and whether the US will have to put troops on the ground to achieve its goals.
“Our goals are clear,” Trump said Monday, laying out four of them:
- Destroying Iran’s missiles.
- “Destroying” Iran’s navy.
- Assuring that Iran “will never get a nuclear weapon.”
- Ensuring that Iran cannot support “terrorist forces” in other countries.
Notably not on that list: regime change, even though Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in Saturday’s initial strikes.
Nevertheless, Trump and his administration have made it clear that they want to see the Islamic government in Iran overthrown, they just want the Iranian people to make it happen if the bombs stop falling.
Seth G. Jones, a former longtime Pentagon adviser, now president of the defense and security department at the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, predicts that the conflict will not end soon.
“When you start talking about trying to build a state, I think you’re talking about months if not,” Jones said Monday. panel discussion.
“Even with the ground troops, trying to do social engineering in a foreign government is very difficult,” he said. “Trying to do that without a reasonable world presence I don’t think is possible.”
Boots on the ground?
Trump is not ruling out sending troops to Iran.
“Every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I’m not saying it,” Trump said The New York Post On Monday.
Likewise, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth refuses to withdraw American troops from the country.
The killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has some, including US President Donald Trump, hoping it will force regime change in Iran. Nationally, CBC’s Eli Glasner reveals whether an attack can change the government and what needs to happen for real change to happen.
“We will go where we need to to advance America’s interests,” Hegseth said during a Monday news conference at the Pentagon in response to a question about ground troops.
For months, Trump’s top political advisers have been urging him to put more emphasis on the economy and the cost of living, which polls repeatedly show are the top concerns of American voters.
The war could not only distract Trump from focusing on his economic message in the coming weeks or months, but it could also create higher energy costs for the American people.
War ‘not what the American people want’: Schumer
Democrats have already signaled that they will try to use the situation.
Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic Alliance in the Senate, said on Monday that war “is not what the American people want.”
“They don’t want a war that results in the loss of American lives and costs billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. They don’t want a war that raises the price of gas at the pump,” Schumer said in a speech from the Senate floor.
Sabrina Singh, who was Deputy Pentagon Secretary in the Biden administration, says the war will raise the price of gas, electricity and groceries for the average American.
“This is exactly what the Republicans don’t want to continue, they don’t want to talk about Iran, they want to talk about the economy,” Singh told CNN.
On Monday, Trump and key members of his cabinet wanted to talk about the war, but the reasons they gave were sometimes inconsistent.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump’s national security adviser, said the “imminent threat” that Iran would retaliate if Israel began attacking the country was the reason for the US military action.
“We knew there would be an Israeli action. We knew that would trigger an attack by the US military,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill when he arrived to brief lawmakers on the war.
“We knew that if we didn’t follow, we wouldn’t expect it [Iran] before they start that attack, we’re going to get hurt a lot,” Rubio said. “We weren’t going to sit there and hold our breath before we responded.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Monday that the U.S. hopes the Iranians can overthrow the government in Tehran following the assassination of the country’s supreme leader, but the goal of the U.S. campaign is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and eliminate the threat posed by its navy.
Hegseth emphasized Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities.
“Iran is building powerful missiles and drones to create a common shield for their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon press conference.
“Tehran was not negotiating. They were stalling, buying time to reload their missiles and restart their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said. “Our bases, our people, our allies, everything is in their crosshairs.”
Trump emphasized regime change.
“Today, the United States military continues to fight in Iran to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this evil terrorist regime,” he said in his opening remarks on Monday.
“For almost 47 years this regime has been attacking America and killing Americans,” he said.
“This was our last, best chance to strike – which we are doing right now – and end the intolerable threats posed by this sick and corrupt regime.”
There could be many different reasons for attacking a regime that has long oppressed women, killed thousands of its own people in recent protests and supported the forces of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Whether the American electorate is interested in continued military action to turn Iran away from it all seems likely to be tested in the coming weeks or months.
