US President Donald Trump has said he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary.”
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump told The Post on Monday after launching strikes to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
Trump told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he estimated the war would last “four weeks or so,” but hinted to The Post on Monday that that timeframe could be shortened.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.
The president said he made the final decision to strike “after the final talks” Thursday in Geneva — in part because of intelligence that Iran was surreptitiously resuming work on nuclear projects.
“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back,” he said.
“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”
“I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
Trump insisted that he believes he did “the right thing” and that most Americans support him — despite initial polling indicating otherwise — arguing that allowing “crazy people” to acquire a nuclear weapon would have been worse than even a regional conflict.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said.
“I don’t think the polling is low,” he went on. “Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it’s not a question of polling. You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.
“I think people are very impressed with what is happening, actually,” Trump insisted. “I think it’s a silent — if you did a real poll, the silent poll — and it’s like a silent majority.”