By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Photo: Youtube Screengrab.
The Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the attack on Iran was grounded in what she called a “feeling based on fact” that Iran would imminently attack the United States and its allies.
The U.S. and Israel launched the war Saturday, targeting Iran’s leadership, missile arsenal and nuclear program while suggesting that toppling the government is a goal. But the exact aims and timelines have repeatedly shifted, signaling an open-ended conflict.
President Donald Trump praised the U.S. military Wednesday for “doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly.”
Israel also traded fire with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, while Iran fired on Bahrain, Kuwait and Israel. As the conflict spiraled, Turkey said NATO defenses intercepted a ballistic missile launched from Iran before it entered Turkey’s airspace.
The war has killed more than 1,000 people in Iran, more than 70 in Lebanon and around a dozen in Israel, according to officials in those countries. It has disrupted the supply of the world’s oil and gas, snarled international shipping and stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers in the Middle East.
“The president was not going to be just another president on a very long list who sat back and stood by and passed the buck of this direct threat to the next administration,” she said at a White House briefing.
“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the United States was going to strike our assets in the region, and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all of those reasons,” Leavitt added.
Leavitt batted down a question from a reporter about the US involvement in a strike on an Iranian girls’ elementary school, which killed 175 people.
The press secretary did not accept US responsibility for the attack, and noted that the Pentagon is investigating the strike (as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier).
Leavitt also said U.S. ground troops in Iran are “not part of the plan” at present.
“They’re not part of the plan for this operation at this time, but I certainly will never take away military options on behalf of the president of the United States or the commander in chief, and he wisely does not do the same for himself,” Leavitt said.
Hegsten during an early-morning briefing at the Pentagon told reporters that the leader of an Iranian unit believed to have been behind an effort to pay for an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Trump had been “hunted down and killed.”
“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also told reporters on Wednesday that the U.S. and Israel “will control Iran and will control it soon” by dominating Iran’s “airspace and waterways” and said the U.S. was working to “annihilate” Tehran’s navy, including a ship in the Indian Ocean which was sunk by an American submarine’s torpedo.
He claimed the sunk ship had been named for the late Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qassem Soleimeni and hailed the submarine’s kill as the first torpedo sinking of a surface ship since the end of the Second World War even though Pakistani and British submarines successfully sank Indin and Argentinian ships in 1971 and 1982, respectively.