BREAKING: Trump Says He Is Prepared To 'Obliterate' Iran On Massive Scale

President Donald Trump does not want war with Iran, but if there has to be one it will not be like Iraq or any war in recent memory.

The president said in an interview with NBC News on Friday that the war he would wage would be one designed to obliterate Iran.

The interview came a day after the president first approved, and then rescinded, and order to strike Iran in retaliation for its attack on an American spy aircraft.

Iran shot down the aircraft over international waters, which Iran denies, an act of war by any standard of common sense.

But President Trump decided not to attack when he discovered that the attack could cost as many as many as 150 Iranian lives.

He deemed that the punishment was not commiserate with the shooting of an unmanned drone that cost no lives.

“I’m not looking for war,” the president said on Friday in an interview with NBC News on what he could decide to do on Iran.

“And if there is, it will be obliteration like you’ve never seen before. But I’m not looking to do that. But you cannot have a nuclear weapon.

“You want to talk — good. Otherwise you’re going to have a bad economy for the next three years,” the president said.

The United States military could eliminate the entire Iranian Navy within two days, a study conducted by The Pentagon found.

But that could cause any number of responses by the Iranian regime, bent on maintaining its hold on the nation and its citizens.

“Very quickly we could end with miscalculation as both sides fear offensive action by the other or tit for tat that escalates into a much more significant conflict,” Ilan Goldenberg, the director of Middle East Security Program at the Center for New American Security said on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/ilangoldenberg/status/1141731389336936453

“If the US wants to consider force it would be much wiser to do something quiet and deniable (I.e. covert) and then send the Iranians a private message that it was the US  & Iran needs to knock it off or face something worse,” he said.

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“This would not embarrass the Iranians forcing them to respond publicly. But it would send a message that Iran is in danger of getting into a direct conflict with the US – something it will want to avoid,” he said.

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“Israel has operated this way in the past (see Syria) and so has the US. it trended to work while avoiding war,” he said.

https://twitter.com/ilangoldenberg/status/1141731762537672707