BBC Expert Says Even Trump Does Not Know What He Wants From Iran Crisis

Even Donald Trump does not know what his “strategic objective” in Iran is right now, according to a BBC expert.

The US renewed its strikes on Iran on Thursday morning hours after the president told reporters the American military would soon be hitting the country “very hard”.

The attacks were a response to Tehran’s new strikes targeting US forces in the Middle East.

Jordan said it shot down five missiles from Iran and at least 20 people were killed in joint US-Saudi strikes on Iranian-backed forces in Iraq.

An American tanker was among two ships which caught fire in Egypt too, in an apparent drone strike.

As the war widens, the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen suggested even the US president – who started the war back in February – was not sure of the next step.

He pointed to reports from Washington that suggest there are divisions within the Trump administration about what to do next.

Bowen said: “Trump himself cannot focus on a strategic objective for what he wants, and that’s behind all these wild oscillations and fluctuations we’re seeing in the things he says.”

The specialist added that the militias across the Middle East – which the US is now fighting – had all cropped up because of the Iraq war more than two decades ago.

Bowen said: “Consequences of a disaster almost 25 years feeding into what has become the current disaster, because of Donald Trump’s decision to go for an easy victory, which he thought he could go for back in February but hasn’t happened.

“Now he’s in a position where he couldn’t get a quick deal.”

“It’s a very difficult and confused situation,” the expert continued. “Those countries in the Gulf are particularly suffering from the fallout from all of this because the Americans essentially got them into this mess and the Americans have not got them out of this mess.

“They are realising they might need to do more things themselves so they’re having to respond on quite a fluctuating basis to the events that are going on there, it’s a sign of the overall confusion.

“If you look right across the region, on every front – apart from the ones we have discussed – there are red lights showing.

“The continuing problems in Lebanon, the continuing scenes in Gaza, the escalation of violence with Jewish settlers who are very much on the rampage and Palestinians in the West Bank.

“The lesson that we’ve learnt over many years with the Middle East is that these things do not end without consequences and those consequences can go on for a very long time.”

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