WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump said during a primetime address Wednesday that the US military’s “little journey” in Iran will conclude “very shortly.”
“We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders. That means eliminating Iran’s navy, which is now absolutely destroyed, hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before, and annihilating their defense industrial base. We’ve done all of it,” Trump said.
“There’s never been anything like it, militarily,” he said. “Everyone is talking about it, and tonight, I’m pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion.”
The administration’s announcement late Tuesday that Trump would deliver official televised remarks Wednesday had left many wondering if the president had significant news to publicly share about the deadly, expensive, month-long war.
But Trump largely recycled statements during the 18-minute speech that he and Cabinet officials have been making for several weeks.
The US will hit Iran “extremely hard” over the next two to three weeks and “bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong,” he said, echoing statements he’s already posted on social media or shared with the press.
An unpopular conflict
The war has rippled across the Middle East, causing thousands of deaths, including those of 13 US troops, and severe damage to energy and other civilian infrastructure.
Global oil prices surged after Iran’s takeover of the Strait of Hormuz, where one-fifth of the world’s petroleum passes through, and a gallon of gas now costs just over US$4 on average across the US.
Support for the war has not taken off. Roughly two-thirds of Americans told Reuters/Ipsos pollsters within the past week that the United States should work to end the conflict quickly.
Trump’s statements on his war aims and off-ramp from the fighting have changed by the day, if not more. He told reporters Tuesday Iran’s regime had been successfully changed, and he planned to end the campaign in “two or three weeks.”
But Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Majtaba Khamenei, is reportedly not far off from, and possibly more radical than, his father, Ali Khamenei, whom U.S. and Israeli forces killed at the outset of the war.
Trump was quoted Wednesday by Reuters as saying, “I don’t care” about Iran’s near-weapons-grade enriched uranium buried under rubble at a nuclear site the US and Israel bombed in June, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A major reason for starting the war, Trump said in his February 28 eight-minute video announcing the initial attack, was that Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Trump claimed on his social media platform, Truth Social, Wednesday morning that “Iran’s New Regime President, much less Radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE!”
“We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!! President DJT,” he wrote.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei rejected Trump’s claim as “false and baseless,” according to Iran’s English-language state-run broadcaster, PressTV.
War deaths, injuries, displacements
According to the Pentagon, in this conflict 350 service members have been injured in addition to the 13 American service members killed.
The civilian death toll in Iran from US and Israeli strikes climbed to 1,598, including at least 244 children, as of Tuesday, according to the US-based Iran human rights advocacy group, HRANA.
Israel’s concurrent campaign in southern Lebanon has claimed the lives of 1,240, injured 3,680 and displaced 1.1 million people as of Monday, according to Lebanese authorities.
Just over 185 people have been killed across Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, the Palestinian territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by Al Jazeera English from health officials across the region.
Iran’s president posts open letter
Several hours before Trump’s scheduled primetime address to the nation, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who has been in office since 2024, posted what he described as an open letter to Americans claiming the Trump administration is lying to them about Iranian aggression, and describing Iran’s actions as “a measured response grounded in legitimate self-defense, and by no means an initiation of war or aggression.”
“Does the massacre of innocent children, the destruction of cancer-treatment pharmaceutical facilities, or boasting about bombing a country ‘back to the stone ages’ serve any purpose other than further damaging the United States’ global standing?” he wrote, referring to a US missile strike that killed 168 elementary school children on day one of the war.
The Iranian regime killed thousands — estimates vary widely — of its own citizens in January in response to widespread anti-government protests. Pezeshkian also wrote that the Iranian people “harbor no enmity toward other nations,” and blamed Trump for withdrawing the US from the nuclear deal in 2018.
Easy-to-find video shows Iranian lawmakers setting fire to printouts of the American flag and chanting “death to America” on the parliament floor following Trump’s exit from the deal.
Strikes by Iran
Iran has also been behind several nefarious foiled plans it aimed to carry out on US soil. A federal jury in early March convicted a trained Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps operative who was sent to the US to assassinate political figures, including Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.
Iran has been directly or indirectly linked to numerous attacks on US bases in the Middle East over decades, according to the Department of Defense and US intelligence.
Notably, blasts from Iranian strikes in 2020 on Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq caused traumatic brain injuries in over 100 service members following the US drone strike that killed one of Iran’s most prominent military commanders, Qassem Soleimani. During the 2024 campaign, Trump dismissed the troop’s injuries as “headaches.”
This article first appeared on News From The States, part of the States Newsroom, and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
