President Donald Trump has been surprised by Iran’s response to joint U.S.-Israel airstrikes that took out their supreme leader.
The 79-year-old president spoke to CNN’s Jake Tapper for a nine-minute phone interview Monday morning to discuss his order over the weekend to decapitate Iranian leadership, and Trump said he was surprised that Iran had retaliated by striking other Arab countries in the region, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
“We were surprised,” Trump said. “We told them, ‘We’ve got this,’ and now they want to fight, and they’re aggressively fighting. They were going to be very little involved and now they insist on being involved.”
“[They] shot into a hotel, they shot into an apartment house,” he added. “It just made them angry. They love us, but they were watching. There was no reason for them to be involved … that was probably the biggest surprise.”
Trump said the initial strikes were successful and threatened more to come.
“We’re knocking the crap out of them,” Trump said. “I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and we’re using it.”
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard,” he added. “The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.”
The president was asked how long the military operation might last, and he expressed hope that it would end within weeks.
“I don’t want to see it go on too long,” Trump said. “I always thought it would be four weeks, and we’re a little ahead of schedule.”
Trump said his team attempted to negotiate with the Iranians on ending their nuclear ambitions but complained that “we couldn’t make a deal with these people.”
“They had all that enriched stuff,” he said. “They looked at redoing it there, but it was in such bad shape, the mountain had basically collapsed.”
He argued that military strikes would succeed where diplomacy had not.
“We don’t have to worry about agreements,” Trump said. “You go back 37 years, really 47 years, close to 50, look at what’s happened and all the death. People in the military walking around with no legs, walking around with no arms, their faces shattered.”
“Over the last 47 years, I said, ‘give me all of the attacks,’” he added. “If I told you all of them I’d still be talking.”
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