After a busy morning visiting troops in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth traveled to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, for a meeting with U.S. Central Command leadership, where discussion centered on, among other things, operations planned for Iran. "Central Command will be busy tonight because President [Donald J.] Trump said we will be hitting Iran hard, and we will be," Hegseth said, addressing the press. "Iran has a chance to make a good deal, a great deal, to codify what they said they've been willing to do — and they haven't been willing to do it."
Earlier today, Trump said the U.S. has been trying to make a deal with Iran, and while Iran has gone through the motions of an agreement, it has yet to actually commit with both words and deeds. "I've been working with Iran for a number of months, and they should sign the deal," Trump said today at the White House. "It's a good deal. It doesn't give them the right to have a nuclear weapon. In fact, it totally prohibits them from ever having a nuclear weapon."
On June 8, Iran struck and brought down a U.S. helicopter, an AH-64 Apache, near Oman. The crew from that aircraft has been safely returned. But the U.S. struck back yesterday and will again, the president said. "We hit them hard yesterday and we're gonna hit them again hard today," Trump said. "We'll see what happens with the deal. We were really close to a deal. But they keep tapping us along. They keep playing us for suckers." Hegseth said the War Department provides the president with the options he needs to get the deal he wants with Iran. "[Navy] Adm. [Brad] Cooper and the team here at Centcom have done a phenomenal job from the beginning on Epic Fury, and through this blockade, ensuring that we have a chance to reach that end state — which is Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, which they say they don't want, and so since we're so close to that negotiated deal, if that's the case, they should step up and do it," Hegseth said.
0 Comments