Washington, March 3: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said “boots on the ground” may not be necessary, with tensions escalating in the Middle East as Washington trades attacks with Iran.
In an interview with NewsNation journalist Kellie Meyer, Trump said there will soon be retaliation for the attack on the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh and for the deaths of US service members. As of Monday, six US troops were killed in action so far.
The statement was a deviation from Trump’s earlier claim that he does not “have the yips” for having boots on the ground. After launching Saturday’s strikes on Iran, Trump had told NY Post, “Every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it. I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.”
In a departure from his poll promise of ending US involvement in wars, Trump also told NY Post that Washington has more firepower in store, adding that “the big wave hasn’t even happened”.
Trump said on Monday that the US has “the capability to go far longer ” than its projected four-to-five-week time frame for its military operations against Iran, in which six US service members and 555 people in Iran have been killed so far.
He also for the first time laid out objectives — destroying Iran’s missiles, navy and nuclear program and stopping its support for armed groups across the region — which notably did not include toppling the Islamic republic.
The US and Israel have continued to pound Iran since Saturday, killing its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran has responded to the attack by unleashing missiles and drones across the Middle East, threatening explicitly to drive up the global energy costs, which could wreak havoc on the global economy. “We will burn any ship that tries to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” Revolutionary Guards General Sardar Jabbari said of the strategic waterway to the Gulf through which about 20 percent of global seaborne oil travels.
Airspace over most of the Middle East remains shut, causing severe disruptions in flight operations.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States joined only after learning ally Israel was set to strike Iran, in a new narrative on the genesis of the now four-day-old conflict. “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked — and we believed they would be attacked — that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio told reporters before briefing lawmakers.
