Trump: “I Expect to Be Bombing” Iran if No Deal Reached Before Ceasefire Ends. POTUS Says Israel Didn’t Talk Him Into War.
As the U.S-Iran peace talks that are scheduled to begin in Pakistan appear suspended, President Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box he was “ready to go” and begin bombing the country again if it does not open the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has not committed to renew talks with Vice President J.D. Vance and his negotiators, and Vance, Axios reported, has not left for Islamabad. The ceasefire that temporarily ended the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign ends tomorrow.
Trump said the U.S. military used the lull in bombing to restock its munitions, and the military “is raring to go.”
On Truth Social yesterday, Trump again denied that Israel led him into war with Iran, as reported by The New York Times and others.
“Expect to Be Bombing”
Reporting for Axios, former Israeli military intelligence operative Barak Ravid revealed that Vance and his team had not departed for the talks.
“As of midday Tuesday, Vance and White House envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were all still in Washington,” Ravid reported:
A White House official said “additional policy meetings are taking place at the White House today in which the Vice President will participate.”
A U.S. government plane scheduled to take Witkoff and Kushner from Miami to Islamabad via Europe on Tuesday morning never departed — instead taking off around noon bound for Washington.…
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday afternoon that no decision had been made on whether to send a delegation to Islamabad.
He claimed that the U.S. naval blockade calls into question the seriousness of any negotiations.
Still, Trump told Squawk Box talker Joe Kernan Iran had to negotiate. “They have no choice but to send” negotiators, Trump said:
What I think is that we’re going to end up with a great deal.… I think they have no choice. We’ve taken out their navy, we’ve taken out their air force, we’ve taken out their leaders.… We’re in a very strong negotiating position to do what other Presidents should’ve done during a 47-year period — we’ve had 47 years with these bloodthirsty people.
Trump also said U.S. attacks had “obliterated most of their missiles,” which the Iranians are moving around. He also claimed that U.S. forces “have so much ammo, we have so much of everything … much, much more powerful than it was 4 or 5 weeks ago. So we’ve used this to restock, and they probably have done a little bit of restock.”
Kernan asked Trump whether bombing would resume if Vance and his team can’t get a deal.
“Well, I expect to be bombing, because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with,” Trump said:
But, you know, we’re ready to go. I mean, the military is raring to go. They are absolutely incredible.… We have the most powerful military in the world, and everybody knows it.
And Iran, Trump said, should ink a pact with the United States to “get themselves on a very good footing.”
Iran can be “strong nation again, a wonderful nation again,” Trump said:
They have incredible people, but they seem to be bloodthirsty. They’re led by some very, very unfortunately tough people — and I don’t mean tough in a good way…. They have to use reason and they have to use common sense, and they can get themselves into a great position to make themselves into a great country — but a legitimate country, not a country based on death and horror.
Israel Didn’t Talk Me Into War
Strangely, Trump felt the need yesterday to say that Israel didn’t talk him into bombing Iran.
“Israel never talked me into the war with Iran, the results of Oct. 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, did,” he wrote on Truth Social.
That isn’t what the Times reported on April 7. The newspaper revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefed Trump, Vance, and other top advisors in the White House Situation Room on February 11, about two weeks before the attack on Iran. Netanyahu also preposterously claimed that Iran could not close the Strait of Hormuz. Netanyahu also predicted that regime change would be easy-peasy, and that Iranians would rise to replace the Islamic government.
“Sounds good to me,” Trump said.
After the briefing, U.S. intelligence operatives analyzed what Netanyahu claimed. At another meeting, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called Netanyahu’s claim “farcical,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “bullsh*t.”
Early on in the war, recall, Rubio spilled the lentils. “The assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties, and so the president made the very wise decision,” the secretary of state said:
We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties, and perhaps even higher [numbers] killed. And we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.
In other words, Israel would attack Iran without American approval. Thus, the United States had to attack to protect itself from the blowback of Israel’s impending attack.
Trump contradicted Rubio, who also reversed himself.
But in March, former CIA operative John Kiriakou, who went to prison for revealing the agency’s waterboarding of al-Qaeda terrorists, told podcaster Michael Frazese, the former Mafia boss, that Netanyahu threatened a nuclear attack on Iran if the United States didn’t participate in a bombing campaign.
Kiriakou’s sources inside the White House told him that “Trump agreed to bomb Iran because Benjamin Netanyahu threatened him and told him, ‘If you don’t bomb Iran, we’re going to use nuclear weapons against Iran.’”
