President Donald Trump on Wednesday spent nearly an hour attempting to offer multiple justifications of his decision to go to war with Iran and defended the deal his negotiators struck to end the fighting after more than 100 days.
Speaking at the end of his trip to France for this year’s G7 summit, the president opened his largely defensive remarks by touting the 60-day memorandum of understanding as one that “achieves everything we set out to accomplish, everything and much more.”
“Ending the current conflict, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, that’s what was all about. That was about 99% Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, they can’t develop it, buy it, they can never have a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Trump then briefly pivoted to bragging about stock market gains in the days since the White House announced the tentative agreement with Tehran before claiming that the agreement was “years in the making” because he had in his first term ordered the killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who he praised as a “mad genius” who Tehran was never fully able to replace.
“When I hit Soleimani, people thought that was the biggest thing to happen in the Middle East for 50 years. That was the biggest event. He was the, he was the boss of Iran and respected, but, but he was a mad genius. He was a genius, the father of the roadside bomb. When you see young men, and in some cases women, mostly men, walking around without legs, without arms, with a face that’s been blown to smithereens, it’s Soleimani,” he said.
“He did it, he happened to come from Iran, and I blew him up.”
The president called the assassination of the Iranian general nearly seven years ago “one of the biggest events to happen, the Middle East, maybe ever” before changing the subject to the comprehensive nuclear agreement that had been in place before he withdrew the United States from that deal during his first term.
He complained that former president Barack Obama had not been willing to assassinate the Iranian general and then confused the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the U.S. and the other four permanent U.N. Security Council members with a separate settlement the Obama administration had reached with Iran over a decades-long dispute regarding a refund for military equipment that was purchased by the pre-Islamic Republic government and never delivered.
That settlement had nothing to do with the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but Trump nonetheless continued making false statements to the effect that Obama had somehow loaded “a plane with $1,700,000,000 in green cash from banks all over Washington, Maryland, and Virginia” and used it to pay Iranian leaders in exchange for participating in negotiations.
“It all went into a Boeing 757 a wonderful plane, and they flew it to Iran, and they gave it out to people. They bribed people, they thought they were going to get it done. Then they gave billions and billions of dollars after that, and they got a deal that was a road to a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“They were going to take out the entire Middle East, including Israel, and if they had a nuclear weapon, they would have used it with it within moments after getting it, so I made it very tough for them when I terminated the Barack Hussein Obama catastrophe JCPOA.”
He later added that the previous agreement was “really dangerous” because it “gave them everything, including a lot of money.”
Trump then claimed that the tentative deal between the U.S. and Iran does not provide Iran with any funds and stressed that it’s only for 60 days after which point American forces can “go back to bombing” if Iran doesn’t fulfill its terms.
“I don’t want to do that, because it’s so good, but we might have to, because we’re never going to let them have a nuclear weapon, but they’ve agreed not to, and you’ll see that very clearly in the agreement,” he said.
As the president rambled, a second set of U.S. officials attempted to obfuscate the agreement’s actual contents by reading it out to reporters on a separate press conference call held at the exact same time as Trump’s press conference.
The agreement, as read by the U.S. official, does in fact provide for Tehran to receive significant amounts of funds, both through the sale of petroleum products and the release of frozen assets that have long been held by the U.S. under years of sanctions.
It also includes a pledge for the U.S. to “undertake with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran” as well as a promise for Washington to “terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary.”
