Donald Trump has tried to dust off his “Peace President” credentials as his latest war rages on in the Middle East.
“There’s great evil taking place in Iran, as you know, and our military has been unbelievable. We’re knocking the hell out of them,” the president told local Cincinnati outlet WKRC Local 12 Wednesday. “There has never been a better year for a president, first year, than what we had. That includes the stoppage of eight wars, with ninth to come.”
Trump launched “major combat operations” against Iran on Feb. 28 with joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. But he has struggled to stick to any clear rationale for the conflict, most recently claiming he is attacking the Iranian regime to protect U.S. military assets in the region from retaliatory strikes in the event Iran came under attack.
More than 1,200 people have been killed in Iran itself—including 175, most of them young girls, who died after a stray Tomahawk missile hit an elementary school in the southern city of Minab. A preliminary Pentagon inquiry found Wednesday the U.S. was likely to blame for that strike.
Iran has responded to the attacks by firing missiles and drones at U.S., Israeli, and allied targets across the region. Global fuel prices have spiked in response to the Islamic regime’s assaults on regional oil infrastructure and closures of vital shipping lines. Seven U.S. service members have been killed and at least 140 wounded in Iranian strikes.
Trump—who has long raged against America’s “Forever Wars” in the Middle East, and repeatedly promised voters he would reduce U.S. military entanglements abroad—made the decision to go to war with Iran after abandoning last year’s campaign to model himself as the “President of Peace,” which had been geared to secure him the Nobel Peace Prize.
That campaign was not successful. The honor went instead to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—later bullied by Trump into handing over her Nobel medal, even as he told the Norwegian prime minister: “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
Trump’s prior claims of stopping “8 Wars Plus,” repeated in his interview with WKRC Local 12, remain a subject of debate. They refer to conflicts between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Hamas, and Israel and Iran.
Critics have seriously questioned how far Trump has “resolved” those conflicts. Some were already frozen, others were largely diplomatic disputes. At least three technically remain ongoing, including the one Trump has lately reignited with his strikes on Iran.
On occasion, Trump appears to have included Russia’s war on Ukraine on the list of conflicts he claims to have ended. He promised to put paid to those hostilities on “day one” of his second presidency. It is now day 417, with no end in sight.
It was not immediately clear whether his Wednesday comments about stopping a “ninth” conflict referred to that war or the one he is currently waging in the Middle East, given the president has repeatedly failed to offer a clear timeline for his campaign against Iran.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
