Speaking to the New York Post on Monday, President Donald Trump stated that Operation Epic Fury, the air war against Iran, was going well, in fact, “way ahead of schedule.” What the president did not do was to rule out the United States sending in ground troops.
President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.
“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 said after launching strikes Saturday 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 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.”
Catching a bunch of those leaders at a morning meeting, in one room, now that’s a stroke of luck that may have put them well ahead of that schedule. But as for ground troops, that’s quite another needle to thread.
Here’s quite an interesting statement from the president:
Trump also said he wasn’t concerned about Iran using terrorism to repay America for the weekend’s attack.
“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.
We have been reporting on just this possibility, including that Iran may well have sleeper cells already here, in the United States. It’s certainly possible that the president knows things we don’t, regarding possible Iranian operatives here. We can hope so; this is one of those areas where knowledge is, in fact, power.
But the notion of sending in ground troops into Iran, now that’s a notion that the administration should approach very, very carefully.
Read More: FBI Now on Red Alert: Iran Strike Sparks U.S. Sleeper Cell Fears
New: Operation Epic Fury Update From Pete Hegseth – ‘This Is Not Iraq’
Iran is a big country with a lot of rugged terrain. The one thing we wouldn’t, and shouldn’t want to get involved in, is hunting down regime stragglers in Iran’s mountains. That is a recipe for us keeping troops on that ground for a long, long time. From all appearances, the Iranian people are anxious enough to turn out the regime’s remnants and get cracking on rebuilding their own country along modern lines, and with that, we may be able to help them, for a short, clearly defined interval, and only to provide support and training for the new country’s officials, both civil and military.
Putting American troops in Iran is something that should be firmly held as a last resort. And, given progress to date, and the number of Iranian thugs that have already been disassembled by American and Israeli munitions, and the joyous reactions by the Iranian people in Iran and elsewhere, it doesn’t really look like it should be necessary.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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