President Trump Makes Case for Military Action in Iran
President Donald Trump made the case for military action in Iran in a primetime address.
He cited past attacks, such as the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing and Iran’s disputed involvement in the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, to justify the current strikes. He argued that his predecessors should have struck Iran long ago. He noted, “This fanatical regime has been chanting ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel’ for 47 years.”
The justification included not just the facts but many counterfactuals.
The president held that if not for his jettisoning of the Iranian nuclear deal engineered by the Obama administration, there would be “no Middle East, no Israel now”; and that if not for the current attack, Iran “would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland” and that Iran would have neared obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The president listed the war’s accomplishments, which included “dead” leadership, a “gone” navy, an air force in “ruins,” radar “annihilated,” and a nuclear program set back. All of this, the president maintained, curtails Iran’s ability to project power outside of its borders.
President Trump promised to send Iran “back to the Stone Age where they belong” should the nation’s leaders not negotiate peace within two to three weeks. At the same time, he set a similar timeframe for the war to end. He said that America’s “core, strategic objectives are nearing completion.”
What if Iran impedes those objectives or does not cooperate with that timeline?
“We have all the cards,” he insisted. “They have none.”
The president urged countries in need of oil to buy it from the United States and counseled the nations reliant on oil from the Strait of Hormuz to take the initiative and secure it themselves.
Throughout, he repetitively, to the point of distraction, relied on superlatives and hyperbole.
He said of Operation Midnight Hammer that “nobody’s seen anything like it,” that Iran would develop “a nuclear weapon like no one’s ever seen before” if not for this action, that America destroyed Iran’s air force “at levels never seen before,” that “there’s never been anything like [this operation] militarily,” that the American “economy will soon be roaring back like never before,” and that America would emerge “safer, stronger, more prosperous, and greater than it’s ever been before.”
The use of the over-the-top language was like nothing any American had heard before.
The speech comes in response to poll numbers that consistently show an unpopular war.
A YouGov/Economist poll registered support at 28 percent and opposition at 59 percent. A CNN survey shows a 66 percent-34 percent advantage for opponents of the war. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from this week gauged approval of the war at 35 percent and disapproval at 60 percent.
The poor numbers that necessitated the primetime address also called into question why this case for the war did not come before it commenced.
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