Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that the war with Iran was “beyond the halfway point” and urged President Donald Trump to ignore polling and continue the war to its completion.
In an interview with Newsmax, Netanyahu portrayed the war with Iran as an existential struggle that concerned all of Western civilization. When asked about a time frame for the war, he said he didn’t want to set a schedule but that it was more than halfway toward its objectives.
“I don’t put a schedule on it. I think we’ve achieved a lot of things — a lot of things,” he said, going on to lay out the accomplishments of the United States and Israel.
“We’ve really degraded this regime, really hit them very hard: hit the IRGC, killed thousands of these stormtroopers, killed their leaders who are spouting this ‘death to America’ doctrine, really knocked out a good chunk of their — not a good chunk — close to finishing their arms industry, just the whole industrial base, wiping out entire plants, and the nuclear program itself,” Netanyahu said.
“Beyond halfway in terms of missions, not necessarily in terms of time,” he clarified.
When confronted with the war’s relative unpopularity in the U.S., with most polls showing a majority opposed, Netanyahu replied that it was the mark of a great leader to look beyond popularity and do what was right.
“You have to weaken them as strongly as you can to prevent them from having intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons that could destroy your cities and destroy America. That’s a pretty good reason to act, whether or not people realize it,” he said, when asked to pitch the war to skeptical U.S. citizens.
“If you work by the polls … I mean, I’m not saying politicians ignore polls; everybody looks at them, but if this is the only thing that decides your course of action, you’re not a leader, you’re a follower,” Netanyahu added.
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Netanyahu has publicly pursued maximalist objectives against Iran, up to and including regime change, but the lack of a general uprising has put this objective up to questioning. Trump seems more willing to pursue a deal with malleable authorities and has increasingly spoken of the possibility of peace in recent weeks.
A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted March 17-20 that surveyed 3,335 people found that 60% were opposed to the war with Iran and 40% were in favor.