The president’s longtime allies at Fox News have pointed out a major flaw in his weekend strikes against Iran.
“There’s been a lot of people commenting at the level of intel that the U.S. and especially Israel had prior to this attack, that it’s really been impressive. So they’ve taken out this leadership,” host Rachel Campos-Duffy began on Fox & Friends Sunday.
“You talk about the leaders that are left behind. Based on the intel that they have, do they think that this B team or, I don’t know, maybe this is the C team that’s left behind,” Campos-Duffy said. President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran on Saturday still saw some of its top leaders survive, even after the death of the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Campos-Duffy, 54, concernedly asked: “Are they—do they have the ability, the authority, the capacity to do what the A team could do? I’m just curious if that was taken into account. Like, why weren’t they also taken out?”
National security correspondent Jennifer Griffin seemed to suggest that the host was right to be concerned.
“Well, I think, first of all, Ali Larijani would be part of the A team. So some of the A team did survive. And that is what’s dangerous in these kinds of strikes,” she said.
Larijani, a top-ranking veteran Iranian politician, was described by Reuters as a “powerbroker,” now that Khamenei is dead.
Griffin continued to explain that the U.S. and Israel would likely need to undertake further strikes in order to target leaders moving “up in the rankings,” and suggested that this would not be a quick job.
“It is not over. There are still remaining leaders and, certainly, they are going to be very careful about how they move around,” the Fox expert summarized.
Campos-Duffy, the wife of Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, has previously criticized Trump’s weak case for attacking Iran. “I think that the president needs to make a better case as to why this is in American interest to potentially go into a kinetic war,” Campos-Duffy said last week.
“Explain to me why I should risk my military-aged boys potentially going into another war in the Middle East,” she added. Campos-Duffy and Duffy share nine children.
As the Fox News crew expressed their worries that major players left alive in Iran could drag out the war, it was announced this morning that three American soldiers had already died in the conflict.
A statement shared by the U.S. Central Command on Sunday morning revealed in part: “As of 9:30 am ET, March 1, three U.S. service members have been killed in action and five are seriously wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury.”
Just a day earlier, during his announcement of war, Trump, 79, had noted that “lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties.”
The president promised that the campaign was “far from over” in a lengthy Truth Social rant following the death of Khamenei.
Writing on his social media app Saturday, Trump vowed: “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
