U.S. strikes Iran after Trump says ‘we’re going to hit them hard’

A woman walks past a banner bearing the images of past and present Iranian leaders. Iran's foreign ministry said on June 10 that the United States had damaged the ongoing international diplomatic effort to end the war, after more U.S. strikes on targets in southern Iran. Photo by ATTA KENARE /AFP via Getty Images

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The U.S. military struck Iran on Wednesday, after U.S. President Donald Trump said that “we’re going to hit them hard again today.”

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The regime said that the United States bombed two Iranian reservoirs, which supply water to thousands of people, according to the Associated Press.

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U.S. Central Command said on Tuesday that it “struck Iranian air defence, ground control stations and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz.”

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Trump announced to reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the United States has been taking “millions of barrels of oil” out of the Islamic Republic nightly. “We’re taking out millions, which I’m just announcing today for the first time. But we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Every night, we took out oil,” the president said.

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“But now I’m going to tell you, because they just figured it out. So now that they figured it out, I can tell you,” he told reporters. “It was very hard for me. I wanted to say it so badly, but I didn’t want to ruin it. Millions of barrels of oil have come out, and that’s why it’s at $85-$90 a barrel instead of $250.”

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Chris Wright, the U.S. energy secretary, reportedly told the House House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Wednesday that he was unaware that the United States had taken millions of barrels of oil out of Iran.

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The attacks on Wednesday came hours after Iran reportedly struck Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. “We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them again hard today,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’ll see what happens with the deal. We were really close to a deal, but they keep tapping us along.”

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“They keep playing us for suckers, because you know what? They deal with some very stupid presidents,” Trump said.

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Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, told JNS that “it’s an endurance contest.”

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“The Iranian regime feels it has all the time in the world to wait out President Trump, and I think it’s incumbent on the Trump administration to try to change that calculus,” he said. “I think that’s why you’re seeing President Trump starting to get publicly impatient with the Iranian regime’s stall tactics and the negotiations.”

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Brodsky told JNS that “after Iranian aggression aimed at American forces, the U.S. administration is increasingly targeting Iranian soil, and that’s a sea change in how we operate.”

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“It really demonstrates the eroded deterrence of the Iranian regime,” he said. “The Iranian regime remains a threat, make no mistake, but it has been weakened as a result of American and Israeli operations. Its defence industrial base has been eroded. Its missile and drone capacity has also been damaged. The Iranian regime, for the first time in years, is not enriching uranium, and that’s because of risk taking and courageous decisions by the Trump administration.”