President Donald Trump has described the ongoing US conflict with Iran as “small potatoes,” while defending Vice President JD Vance’s decision not to call the fighting a war.
Trump made the remarks on Friday when reporters asked him about comments Vance had made a day earlier regarding the months-long military confrontation in the Middle East.
According to Trump, American strikes against Iran have become intermittent, making the situation less intense than a conventional war.
“I can understand what he’s saying,” Trump said, referring to Vance. He added that he considers the situation a “military conflict” but described it as relatively minor from the US perspective.
The comments came despite the conflict reportedly costing US taxpayers more than $37.5 billion and resulting in the deaths of 18 American service members.
Vance had rejected the term “war” during a White House briefing on Thursday. He was asked whether the fighting could end before the November 3 congressional elections, when Republicans will attempt to maintain their narrow control of Congress.
“I wouldn’t call it a war,” Vance said, adding that there was currently no active shooting.
His comments came shortly after Iran launched an attack against Kuwait, a US ally in the Gulf, following a series of American strikes against Iranian targets earlier in the week.
Trump also compared the number of US military deaths in the Iran conflict with casualties from previous American military operations.
He pointed to the January operation in Venezuela, during which US forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and transferred him to New York to face federal drug trafficking charges. Trump said no American service members were killed during that operation.
“In Venezuela, we lost nobody,” Trump said. “And this, we lost 18 people.”
He then contrasted the figure with the much larger number of American deaths recorded during the Vietnam War and other conflicts.
US National Archives records show that 58,220 members of the US armed forces died during the Vietnam War.
When a reporter questioned whether describing the Iran conflict as “small potatoes” was appropriate given the deaths of 18 US service members, Trump returned to one of his main arguments for the military campaign.
He said the operation had significantly weakened Iran’s nuclear capabilities and insisted that Tehran would not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon because if they did you probably wouldn’t be standing here,” Trump said.
The president had previously suggested that the conflict would last only a few weeks, but the fighting has continued for months.
Source: The Telegraph Online. Rewritten and Edited by ED Mic
