President Donald Trump joked on Tuesday that War Secretary Pete Hegseth “didn’t want it to be settled” when he found out the United States had begun negotiations with Iran that could end the war in short order.
The aside from the president occurred when Hegseth attended the Oval Office swearing-in of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and came after Trump allowed the secretary three minutes to speak to reporters about the conflict.
“The air campaign that we’ve conducted, that Israel has conducted alongside us, was one for the history books,” Hegseth said. “Truly, and it’s because we have a president of the United States, that when he sends his warfighters out to fight, he unties their hands to actually go out and close with and destroy the enemy as viciously as possible from moment one. We negotiate with bombs.”
After Hegseth’s comments, Trump returned to the mic and said, “The only two people that were quite disappointed — I don’t want to say this but I have to — I said, Pete and General Razin’ Caine, this thing is going to be settled very soon and they go, ‘Oh, that’s too bad.’ Pete didn’t want it to be settled. These guys are doing a great job, that’s a great attitude though.”
Trump announced on Monday that the U.S. and Iran had begun early talks about possibly ending the war, though it’s unclear how quickly a deal could result, and whether Israel would be on board with it. It also comes as the military is simultaneously deploying additional troops to the region.
A day earlier, the president was in Memphis, Tennessee, when he said Hegseth, who was next to him then, too, was the first Cabinet official to advocate going to war against Iran.
“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, ‘Let’s do it,'” Trump said.
The president’s quips align with his belief that military leaders and lawyers in Washington, D.C., have constrained warfighters’ hands long before the current war and his tenure, which is something he’s worked to undo.
During the first week of the war, which is now closing in on a month, Hegseth boasted U.S. military has “no stupid rules of engagement” when it comes to the conflict compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he served in.
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He addressed the subject in his speech to hundreds of senior officers in Quantico, Virginia, last October as well.
“We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said in the speech. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”
