President Donald Trump authorized military strikes on Iran on Tuesday in retaliation for the downing of a U.S. helicopter that he said “wasn’t a big deal.”
The U.S. military confirmed that “self-defense” strikes had begun on Iran later in the afternoon.
“U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) forces began launching self-defense strikes against Iran at 5 p.m. E.T. today at the Commander in Chief’s direction, in response to yesterday’s downing of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter,” U.S. Central Command announced in a statement in the early evening on Tuesday. “The mission is a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression.”
Trump, 79, had announced earlier in the day on Truth Social that the American military would “respond to this attack.”
“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” the president wrote around midday. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured.”
“Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack,” he added. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
However, The Wall Street Journal reported a few hours after his post that Trump had downplayed the incident in a phone call, saying it “wasn’t a big deal” and that “the pilot is fine.”
Trump’s announcement of strikes follows his claims last night that a deal to end the war, now in its 15th week, was only days away.
“Two or three days,” Trump told a reporter about when a peace deal would be finalized, following his appearance at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, at which he was booed. “We have a good chance of doing it. We should be able to do it in one hour, if you want to know the truth.”
“We’re, uh—we’re very close to having a very, very, good, strong, powerful deal," he continued. “If we go and bomb, which we can do very easily if we want, and we spend another two or three weeks bombing, they’ll have nothing left whatsoever. But you won’t have the Strait [of Hormuz] open for months.”
“If we do the bombing, you know, a lot of people are gonna be killed. Who wants to do that? I don’t,” the president added.
ABC News’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, said that Trump sang a very different tune during a phone call on Tuesday around the same time as CENTCOM’s announcement of U.S. strikes.
“I think it’s very important to respond. They shot down a helicopter, and we are responding as we speak,” Trump said, according to Karl. “This is a response to what they did with our helicopter last night, and I believe the response should be very strong, very powerful, and that’s what this one is.”
Since Trump started his war on Iran on Feb. 28, 13 American service members have been killed, and hundreds more have been wounded.
It has been 101 days since the conflict began, despite the president initially asserting that combat operations would only take “four to six weeks.”
