WASHINGTON — President Trump said Wednesday that the US must “finish the job” in Iran — warning that a “weak, pathetic” future president could allow Tehran to build nuclear bombs.
“We don’t want to leave early, do we? We got to finish the job, right?” Trump said during a rally in Kentucky.
“Some day… perhaps you’ll have a weak, pathetic person” as president, “like Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump said, noting his first-term decision to trash Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Under the Obama deal “they would have had nuclear weapons, and this world would, right now, be a different place,” he said.
The president did not say what specific goals he hopes to achieve in the remainder of the war or share a timeframe — after previously floating four weeks or less.
Trump said he believed he had permanently destroyed Iran’s nuclear ambitions with airstrikes last June on three sites, but that Tehran’s renewed activity required the current war.
“After Midnight Hammer… we figured it’ll be the end of them for a while, but they started again. That’s why we got to finish it, right? We don’t want to go back every two years,” he said.
Trump earlier in the day refused to say if he would call off the US-Israeli operation before assassinating hardline new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his father Ali after his Feb. 28 death.
“I don’t want to comment on that,” told reporters as he left the White House.
‘Practically nothing left’
Trump hailed the US military’s role in targeting Iranian military sites — saying they had obliterated much of the threat.
The armed forces have “practically nothing left” to target and the war would end “soon,” he told told Axios in an interview Wednesday morning.
“Little this and that… Any time I want it to end, it will end,” Trump said, as he authorized the release of oil from US strategic reserves following dramatic price swings.
“The war is going great. We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.”
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At his afternoon rally in Kentucky, Trump said that “over the past 11 days, our military has virtually destroyed Iran — tough country.”
The latest military operations include bombing at least 16 alleged Iranian mine-laying boats along the Strait of Hormuz.
According to US Central Command, American forces have struck more than 5,500 Iranian targets, including more than 60 of the Islamic Republic’s ships.
In fact, Trump said the strikes may have been too effective against naval targets, which he said could have been seized rather than sunk.
“I got angry at my people,” Trump said.
“I said, ‘Are they good?’ ‘Yeah, they’re warships.’ I said, ‘Why the hell did we kill them? Why didn’t we just capture them and use them in our Navy?’ They said, ‘They wouldn’t have qualified for that.’”
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The US military’s actions have included the first use of a torpedo since World War II to sink an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka.
Trump also noted the sinking of alleged Iranian mine-laying vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
“They wanted to drop some mines — very friendly people,” he said. “We knocked out 31 of them.”
