Trump Reveals His Inspiration for Iran Bombing Campaign

President Trump wants to use his kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as a template for his current plan for regime change in Iran.

Fox News’s Brett Baier reported this development after speaking with the president on Monday morning.

“He said there is a plan. He points to Venezuela as a template,” Baier said. “Which means to me that, going in, they had some sense on the ground of what was coming next.”

These situations are already quite different, with the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran having continued for more than 48 hours. And Venezuela didn’t strike back. Moreover, the only semblance of a plan in Venezuela has been a plug-and-play regime change, the success of which has yet to be determined. And what happened to “freeing” Iranians?

“This makes no sense. It is actually insane. Did we bomb Venezuela for days? Weeks? What parts of the Iranian dictatorship does he plan on keeping in control of Iran—as per the Venezuela template??? Let me repeat: Insane,” one X user commented.

Another massive difference here is that Maduro’s government was left largely intact in Venezuela, in the hands of second-in-command Delcy Rodríguez.

“So the plan is: Regime change, by keeping regime in place. Admin told Trump this won’t work in Iran given 3 pronged regime: religious, military & administrative. Killing Supreme Leader to just replace him with tougher hardliner won’t work,” wrote another X user. “One size fits all isn’t a policy. It leads to quagmires.”

“Begs the question: Who is the Delcy Rodríguez of Iran and are they still alive?” MSNOW’s Jesse Rodriguez posited. Probably not.

“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump said to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

Attacking Iran has severely diminished America’s air defense supplies, a predictable outcome that has Pentagon officials panicking mere days into the conflict.

Donald Trump declared war on Iran without congressional approval early Saturday. He has so far failed to provide a timeline—or clear reason—for U.S. involvement, stressing military leadership in the process.

“The mood here is intense and paranoid,” one person familiar with the situation told The Washington Post Monday.

In the weeks leading up to the explosive hostilities, Trump’s top military adviser—Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine—warned the White House against such an attack, arguing that it could entangle America in a prolonged conflict.

“There is concern about this lasting more than a few days,” another source told the Post, adding that it often takes several air defense interceptors to stop an incoming missile. “I don’t think people have fully absorbed yet, like, what that has done with stockpiles.”

Representative Adam Smith, the House Armed Services Committee’s ranking member, warned that the war would only serve to further strain U.S. munitions supplies.

“At this point, it’s on. It’s not like we can say: ‘Hey, Iran, we’re out of missile defense systems now so we’re going to pause for a moment. Is that OK?’ It will stretch our ability to defend everything that we need to defend,” Smith told the Post, describing the American resources as “stretched thin.”

Despite his criticism of the offensive, Caine acquiesced to the president’s whims. Over the last month, he assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a hardware collection across a web of U.S. bases that includes numerous ships—including naval destroyers and aircraft carriers—and more than a dozen jets in the region, reported CNN.

So far, four American soldiers have been killed in the conflict, as have more than 20 Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The current mobilization is the Trump administration’s second attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, which the White House has claimed is for weapons development. The first attack took place on June 22.

At the time, Trump celebrated that the strike had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s three nuclear sites, publicly rejecting a battle damage assessment by the Pentagon that determined that the impact of the missile barrage on the larger program was minimal and had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months.

The White House has thus far failed to explain the discrepancy, or why it needs to spend more taxpayer funds attacking a site that has already been eviscerated. In fact, as of Monday morning, Trump still has yet to address the American people regarding the war—a major departure from his predecessors, who immediately recognized the need to justify the case for military intervention.

Before the June attack, Iran had argued that it was seeking uranium for peaceful purposes, such as expanding its nuclear energy program. The nation has undergone years of nuclear site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and mere weeks before the U.S. bomb strike had allowed the agency’s inspectors to remain in the country, according to the U.N. entity.

Trump scrapped a potential nuclear deal with Iran during his first term, pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018.

Fewer than one in three Americans trust Trump a “great deal or quite a bit” to make good decisions with America’s military, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll published Thursday. Just 27 percent said so, while 56 percent of respondents said they trust the president “only a little or not at all.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth basically admitted during a press conference Monday that he doesn’t care about military rules of engagement, and is grateful that Israel doesn’t either.

“Israel has clear missions as well for which we are grateful. Capable partners, as we’ve said since the beginning, capable partners are good partners, unlike so many of our traditional allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force,” Hegseth said, scoffing at America’s allies in Europe as well as international law meant to minimize civilian casualties and prevent war crimes.

“America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise airpower campaign in history. B-2s, fighters, drones, missiles, and, of course, classified effects, all on our terms, with maximum authorities,” Hegseth added. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time, or lives.”

Hegseth is spitting in the face of not only the U.N. but any restraints or checks on targets. He also seems to be disregarding the need to plan the aftermath of a wanton war, making America’s botched Iraq reconstruction look almost quaint. It’s quite evident that the lives he is referring to aren’t the civilians in Iran or the rest of the region.

Invoking Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court over the country’s massacre in Gaza, further shows that Hegseth is happy to bomb Iran with impunity, regardless of the human cost.

For the last three years, Israel has reduced much of Gaza to rubble, wiped out entire families, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians across Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Now Hegseth is willing to enlist the U.S. to follow the same playbook. Israel used artificial intelligence in its mass, reckless targeting in Gaza. Hegseth doesn’t care about the consequences if the U.S. does the same, or perhaps even worse.

Did President Donald Trump order a deadly military strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran because the Pentagon was using an out-of-date map?

At least 175 people were killed Saturday in an attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh, a girls’ primary school in Minab, a southern town miles from Tehran. Among the dead were dozens of young girls between the ages of 7 and 12, according to the public prosecutor in Minab. It appeared to be the deadliest attack of the U.S. and Israel’s blatantly illegal bombing campaign in Iran.

It was not immediately clear why the school was targeted, but satellite images from 2013 showed that the school was previously connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, naval base. More recent satellite images from 2016 showed that the school had been separated from the naval base by a wall, according to The New York Times.

Video footage of the area appeared to show that the IRGC base was also struck as part of the attack.

Captain Tim Hawkins, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, said Saturday that the military was “looking into” reports of civilian casualties. The search for survivors trapped under the rubble ended Sunday, according to Minab’s governor.

In a statement Sunday, UNESCO condemned the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh as a grave violation of international law, which prohibits attacks on schools. But the strike on the girls’ primary school was one of two deadly strikes that appeared to hit schools in Iran: two students were also killed at Hedayat High School in Tehran.

Three U.S. fighter jets were shot down over Kuwait in what the U.S. Central Command described as a “friendly fire incident.” Each pilot involved reportedly ejected from their jet and survived.

“At 11:03 p.m. ET, March 1, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagles flying in support of Operation Epic Fury went down over Kuwait due to an apparent friendly fire incident. During active combat—that included attacks from Iranian aircraft, ballistic missiles, and drones—the U.S. Air Force fighter jets were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses,” CENTCOM wrote in a statement. “All six aircrew ejected safely, have been safely recovered, and are in stable condition. Kuwait has acknowledged this incident, and we are grateful for the efforts of the Kuwaiti defense forces and their support in this ongoing operation.”

The news immediately raised both skepticism and concern for competency.

“Friendly fire does happen. But three F-15Es? Downstream effects of ops tempo + lack of training + faulty mission planning + panic,” Air Force veteran and former Representative Denver Lee Riggleman III wrote on X. “I mission planned F-15Es for a living in the USAF.… Our military is IN Kuwait on permanent station in multiple locations. This is operational incompetence.”

“‘Friendly fire’ shooting down, not one, but three US F15 jets is an insane way to say you got fu€ked by Iran,” Lebanese activist Hadi Nasrallah claimed.

“The claim all three US warplanes were brought down by ‘friendly fire’ deserves further scrutiny,” Drop Site News’s Jeremy Scahill said. “CENTCOM also noted that the planes went down ‘During active combat—that included attacks from Iranian aircraft, ballistic missiles, and drones.’”

Whether claims of friendly fire are true or an attempt to cover up devastating incompetence, it’s clear that the Trump administration is moving wastefully and recklessly in its war on Iran. It has already killed hundreds of innocent Iranian men, women, and children, and the war has also resulted in four U.S. troop deaths.