President Donald Trump can’t seem to explain why he went to war with Iran or what his goals are for the military campaign.
The president has given four different explanations in two days about how long he plans to bomb Iran and what he envisions for the country’s future, leading to accusations that he’s making up the deadly military campaign as he goes along.
The administration has also given shifting explanations about why Trump started the war in the first place.
The repeated contradictions suggest the president does not have a long-term strategy in place for the joint U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered a wave of retaliatory attacks in the region that left three American soldiers dead.
“All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told The Washington Post at about 4 a.m. local time on Saturday, soon after announcing “major combat operations” against Iran.
Later that day, he told Axios that he could end the war in “two to three days” if Iran’s new leaders agreed to end its nuclear program.
Then on Sunday, he said the ongoing attacks would last “four to five weeks,” and insisted that it wouldn’t be hard for Israel and the U.S. to continue bombing Iran despite the risk of more U.S. troops dying in a wider regional conflict, The New York Times reported.
One option, Trump said, would be to leave most of the government intact, like in Venezuela, but with leaders who were willing to work with the U.S. to avoid further attacks. He said he had “three very good choices” about who could lead Iran.
But then, on Sunday night, Trump changed his story yet again by telling Jonathan Karl of ABC News that the top candidates to take over Iran had been killed in the initial attack on Saturday.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told Karl, according to a post on X by a veteran Washington correspondent.
On Sunday, Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, said an interim committee would run the country until a successor for the supreme leader was chosen, the Times reported.
The president appeared to be calling up journalists to “workshop different timelines and goals for his war,” The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom remarked in a post on X.
“He’s throwing spaghetti at the wall,” Carlstrom said, adding that there were “plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”
According to Politico, the president spoke to 10 different reporters over the weekend but failed to offer consistent, specific answers to their questions about his plans or the justification for the war.
The administration’s explanations for why Trump ordered the strikes have been equally murky.
The White House on Saturday claimed that after weeks of deliberations, Trump finally decided to launch a full-scale attack against Iran because the U.S. had received indications that the country was planning to launch missile attacks against U.S. bases.
But during a briefing with congressional staffers, Pentagon officials said there was no evidence that Iran had been planning preemptive strikes.
During a video announcing the strikes, Trump also claimed Iran was building missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland.”
U.S. intelligence assessments, however, contradicted that claim, finding that Iran was years away from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and wasn’t interested in doing so.
After the U.S. military’s Central Command announced that three soldiers had been killed at a base in Kuwait and five seriously wounded, Democratic lawmakers blasted the president for putting service members in harm’s way without laying out a plan for victory in the region.
In a video statement Sunday, Trump shrugged off the casualties as “the way it is.”
Rep. Pat Ryan of New York, a 43-year-old combat veteran of the Iraq War, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that it was “pathetic” the president hadn’t provided answers to the families of the fallen soldiers.
“It’s because he doesn’t have answers,” Ryan said. “There’s not a plan here, or if there is, he’s not sharing it with the American people.”
The former U.S. Army intelligence officer said the Iran campaign was reminiscent of “past ill-conceived, half-baked regime-change wars that sound good until they start, and then all of a sudden, no one knows what the heck is going on, and it’s young American men and women that pay the price.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
