Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: In a new twist, US President Donald Trump on March 23 suggested that his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was the first one to push for military action. “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up, and you said, ‘Let’s do it because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,'” Trump said, with Hegseth beside him. For a war that has already seen multiple reports and stories on who it was in the Trump administration that favoured an offensive against Iran, this was yet another.
Why did we go to war with Iran? Ask any two people in Donald Trump’s administration and you probably won’t get the same answer. Depending on who is speaking within the administration, the reasons for going to war with Iran seem to vary.
Some have claimed Israel was going to strike anyway, making US involvement inevitable. Others have insisted Iran was on the brink of deploying a nuclear weapon. Trump, for his part, offered his own dramatic retelling of the moment the decision took shape.
“I called Pete. I called General Kane. I called a lot of our great people,” he said. “We got a problem in the Middle East Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.” The phrasing may have been casual. The consequences have not been.
If the origins of the war are murky, the administration’s account of what followed is no clearer. Just hours before singling out Hegseth, Trump claimed that Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the Gulf came as a surprise. “Look at the way they attacked, unexpectedly, all of those countries,” he said. “Nobody was even thinking about it.”
