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US President Donald Trump has given Americans a short list of his goals in attacking Iran, but when it comes to the justification for starting the war and how the conflict is expected to play out, he and his team are sending mixed messages.
“We’re going to win easily,” Trump said Monday at the White House during a military medal of honor ceremony.
Moments later, the president suggested he was prepared to keep American troops in the fight if it didn’t end quickly.
“We projected four to five weeks, but we have the ability to go much longer than that,” Trump said. “Whatever time it is, it’s fine. Whatever it takes.”
With the conflict still in its earliest days, two polls taken after the airstrikes began suggest Trump still has a lot of work to do to sell him to the American people.
Poll for Reuters which he implements polling firm Ipsos found that only 27 percent of American respondents said they approved of strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, 43 percent said they disapprove, and the rest were unsure. The online survey was conducted Saturday and Sunday with 1,282 US adults from a nationally representative panel.
US President Donald Trump said that the joint military operation with Israel should initially last four to five weeks before it could continue ‘much longer than that’.
Poll for CNN which he implements polling firm SSRS found that 41 percent of respondents approve of the decision to take military action against Iran, while 59 percent disapprove. The survey was conducted via text message with 1,004 adults from a nationally representative panel.
The war comes as Trump’s overall approval ratings plummet as key November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress approach.
Political risk for Trump
Wars that faced a clear threat to the US in the past often created a rallying-around-the-flag effect that increased the president’s political fortunes.
However, polls suggest it is far from clear that the Iran war is having that effect on Trump, even in the short term. If the conflict drags on until spring, all bets are off – especially for a president who came to power promising not to start new wars.
Republican strategist Jason Roe says for Trump that the political risk of war directly depends on its outcome.
“If we defeat Iran without terrorist attacks coming to America or harming allies in the region, that will be a political victory for Trump,” Roe he told Politico on weekends.
Canada’s last head of mission to Iran Dennis Horak, lawyer and human rights activist Kaveh Shahrooz and University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau discuss U.S. President Donald Trump’s volatile comments about his endgame for Iran and whether regime change is possible after a U.S.-Israeli strike killed Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday.
“If this escalates into a protracted conflict, or ends up with troops on the ground, that will be a liability,” he said.
The debate revolves around how long the conflict could last and whether the US will need to send troops into the field to achieve its goals.
“Our goals are clear,” Trump said Monday, laying out four of them:
- Destruction of Iran’s missile capabilities.
- “Destroy” the Iranian Navy.
- Ensure that Iran “can never get a nuclear weapon”.
- Ensure that Iran cannot support “terrorist armies” in other countries.
Notably not on that list: regime change, albeit Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the first Saturday strikes.
Yet Trump and his administration have made it clear that they want to see Iran’s Islamic government overthrown, they just want the Iranian people to do so as soon as the bombs stop falling.
Seth G. Jones, a longtime former Pentagon adviser who is now chairman of the defense and security division at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, predicts that the conflict will not end quickly.
“When you start talking about trying to shape a regime, I think you’re talking about months if not longer,” Jones said Monday in panel discussion.
“Even with ground troops, trying to socially engineer a foreign government is incredibly difficult,” he said. “Trying to do that without a significant presence on the ground, I think, is going to be almost impossible.”
Boots on the ground?
Trump does not rule out sending troops to Iran.
“Every president says, ‘There won’t be boots on the ground.’ I don’t say that,” Trump said New York Post on Monday.
Likewise, Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth refuses to rule out the deployment of US troops inside the country.
The assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has led some, including US President Donald Trump, to hope it will force regime change in Iran. For The National, CBC’s Eli Glasner explains whether attacks can change government and what needs to happen for real change to happen.
“We will go as far as it takes to advance American interests,” Hegseth said during a Pentagon press conference Monday when asked about troops on the ground.
For months now, Trump’s top policy advisers have been pushing him to place far more emphasis on the economy and the cost of living, which polls have repeatedly shown are top concerns among American voters.
Not only could the war distract Trump from focusing on his economic message in the coming weeks or months, it could also trigger higher energy costs for Americans.
War ‘is not what the American people want’: Schumer
Democrats are already signaling that they will try to take advantage of such a scenario.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Monday that war “is not what the American people want.”
“They don’t want a war that results in American lives being lost and that costs billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. They don’t want a war that raises the price of gas at the pump,” Schumer said in a Senate speech.
Sabrina Singh, who was the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary in the Biden administration, says the war will raise gas, electricity and grocery prices for the average American.
“That’s exactly what the Republicans don’t want to talk about, they don’t want to talk about Iran, they want to talk about the economy,” Singh told CNN.
On Monday, Trump and key members of his administration sought to make the case for war, but the reasons they offered were sometimes inconsistent.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, said the “imminent threat” that Iran would retaliate after Israel begins its strikes against the regime was the reason for the US military operation.
“We knew there was going to be Israeli action. We knew it was going to advance an attack on American forces,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill as he arrived to brief lawmakers on the war.
“We knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after (Iran) before they launched those attacks, we would suffer more losses,” Rubio said. “We didn’t want to sit back and get hit before we responded.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Monday that the US hopes the Iranian people can overthrow the government in Tehran after the assassination of the country’s supreme leader, but that the US mission aims to destroy Iran’s short-range ballistic missile capability and eliminate the threat posed by its navy.
Hegseth emphasized Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities.
“Iran has been building powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for its nuclear blackmail ambitions,” Hegseth said at a Pentagon news conference.
“Tehran did not negotiate. They stalled, buying time to reload their missile stockpile and restart their nuclear ambitions,” Hegseth said. “Our bases, our people, our allies, all in the crosshairs.”
Trump emphasized regime change.
“Today, the United States military continues to conduct large-scale combat operations in Iran to eliminate the serious threats posed to America by this horrific terrorist regime,” he said in his first speech on Monday.
“For almost 47 years, this regime has been attacking the United States and killing Americans,” he said.
“This was our last, best chance to strike — which we are doing right now — and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.”
Indeed, there could be many different reasons for attacking a regime that has long subjugated women, killed thousands of its own people in recent protests, and supported the militant forces of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Whether American voters have an appetite for a protracted military operation to transform Iran from anything it appears will be tested over the coming weeks or months.
