Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

President Donald Trump gave a primetime televised address Wednesday to discuss the war on Iran, his first since the United States and Israel launched attacks on February 28. Trump gave few clues about when or how the war could end, but he boasted about killing top Iranian leaders and degrading the country’s military. He threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Despite the grandiose claims, built on “lies and delusions,” Trump “did not add anything new,” says Iranian American scholar Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, who calls Trump’s shifting justifications an admission of “defeat in the war of narratives.”

We also speak with journalist Spencer Ackerman, who says the U.S. has already lost the war. “Iran has changed the entirety of this conflict,” he says. “It has pivoted this conflict onto its own territory and its own goals, and the United States does not have a military mechanism to redress that, primarily the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Iran is threatening to escalate attacks in the Middle East after President Trump delivered a primetime address in which he threatened to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” Global stock prices tumbled and oil prices jumped after Trump vowed to continue striking Iran, even though he claimed Iran had already been decimated militarily and economically.

Rubio Unironically Says Iran Should Spend Money on Its People, Not on Military

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [Thanks to] the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [Thanks to] the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also repeated his threat to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure, which is considered a war crime.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Earlier in the day, Trump spoke at an Easter lunch event at the White House. He gave attendees a preview of his primetime remarks.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And tonight I’m making a little speech at 9:00, and basically I’m going to — I’m going to tell everybody how great I am, what a great job I’ve done, what a phenomenal job. What a phenomenal job I’ve done!

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And tonight I’m making a little speech at 9:00, and basically I’m going to — I’m going to tell everybody how great I am, what a great job I’ve done, what a phenomenal job. What a phenomenal job I’ve done!

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by two guests.

Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winning reporter, the author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump and the Forever Wars newsletter, his latest piece headlined “So You Lost A War To Iran.”

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is a fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was previously professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, the author of several books, including Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran, as well as a memoir about his years on death row in Evin Prison in Tehran called Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution. His latest book, just out this year, is titled The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions.

We begin with Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi. Thanks so much for joining us again. Why don’t you respond, overall? Many people were waiting with bated breath to see what President Trump was going to announce in his primetime address, the first one since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. What did you make of what he said?

BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI: First of all, thank you for having me back on the show.

I think it was a very anticlimactic kind of speech. And as we expected, he structured his speech around lies and delusions, I think. And he did not add anything new about what we already have heard from him. And I think possibly the most important part of this speech last night was the timing of it. And this was a speech that one should have expected to hear before the start of the war, because it was mostly about justification of the war.

And my take on it is that it was, in a sense, a kind of admission to defeat in the war of narratives, and I think that they feel, the White House feels, that they need to go back to point zero and to speak about why are we in the war with Iran and what the objectives are and what the end goal is and how we can find an off-ramp to end this war. And so, yeah.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Spencer, I mean, one of the things, as Behrooz just said, it’s not only that Trump seemed to repeat, without any variation at all, various comments he’s made in the past weeks on social media, but some of the key issues — if you could talk about some of the key issues he did not mention, including the surge of U.S. troops, the military personnel who are en route to the Middle East now?

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Indeed. Good morning, Nermeen. Good morning, Amy. Lovely to be here with Behrooz especially. We’re going to learn a lot from this conversation.

This was a speech that we shouldn’t normalize, even for Trump. This was a cavalcade of lies on top of the delusions and the incoherence there. But most importantly, as you mention, while Trump is trying to domestically reassure his base — and more, perhaps, to the point, reassure markets — that he hasn’t just plunged the United States and the world into a compounding economic disaster,........

© Truthout