President Trump has said that the US would be “leading the pack” in an attack on Iran if a deal isn’t reached on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump made the comment in an interview with Time Magazine that was published on Friday, when asked about the possibility of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragging the US into a war with Iran.
“You asked if he’d drag me in, like I’d go in unwillingly. No, I may go in very willingly if we can’t get a deal. If we don’t make a deal, I’ll be leading the pack,” Trump said.
The president has been threatening to bomb Iran if a nuclear deal isn’t reached, even though there’s no evidence Tehran is working to build a nuclear weapon, a fact recently confirmed by US intelligence agencies.
Trump said in the interview that he believes he can reach a deal with Iran. Since starting the talks earlier this month, the US and Iran have held three rounds of negotiations, and both sides continue to say there’s been progress.
Netanyahu has been working against the possibility of a deal, saying any agreement must completely dismantle Iran’s civilian nuclear program, an unacceptable condition for Tehran.
Netanyahu said on Sunday that any agreement must eliminate “all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program” and that Israel “cannot live with anything short of that—anything short of that could bring you the opposite result.”
The Israeli leader has repeatedly invoked the “Libya model,” referring to when former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his nuclear infrastructure in 2003. Only eight years later, in 2011, Gaddafi was brutally killed by US-backed militants after a NATO airstrike hit his convoy amid a US-NATO bombing campaign.
