Trump says he didn’t start the Iran war, and the missing leaders are ‘minor details’

Donald Trump has found who started the Iran war, and it isn’t the president who launched it.

Asked on Kansas City’s KCMO on Friday morning what the endgame looks like, Trump said the war will “get wrapped up soon.” Then he set the record straight: “I didn’t start the war with Iran. They started the war with us.” He dated that to 1979 and ran through the USS Cole and Qassem Soleimani. Reuters reported on 28 February that the US and Israel had launched a “pre-emptive” attack on Iran, the start of this war.

Then he read out the scoreboard: 159 ships “at the bottom of the sea” and 268 airplanes in “little tiny pieces.” Those are his numbers. Then came the catch: Iran’s leaders, he said, are “so gone, we don’t know who to negotiate with, but these are minor details.” He still wants a deal, though: “We need a guarantee there’ll never be a nuclear weapon.”

On Tuesday it would end whenever he wanted. On Friday it ends “one way or the other,” with a guarantee from leaders he says are gone.