President Trump spoke with CNN anchor Jake Tapper for nine minutes, saying that the larger wave of the operation in Iran has not yet begun.
“We’re crushing them,” Trump reportedly told Tapper. “I think it’s going very well. It’s very powerful. We have the greatest military in the world and we’re using it.”
He added: “We haven’t even started hitting them hard yet. The big wave hasn’t even happened yet. The biggest one is coming soon.”
Asked how long the war could last, the U.S. president said around one month. “I don’t want to see it go on too long. I always thought it would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule,” he said.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes against neighboring Arab countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have been “the biggest surprise,” Trump added.
“We were surprised,” he said. “We told them, ‘We’ve got this under control,’ and now they want to fight. And they’re fighting aggressively. They were going to be very minimally involved, and now they insist on getting involved.”