President Donald Trump revived talk of the United States smuggling arms to the Iranian people for the purpose of fighting the regime, suggesting that weapons were already on their way.
Talk of arming the Iranian people died down after speculation in the first weeks of hostilities, with Trump claiming weapons were sent, but that the Kurds took them all. In a Monday interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Trump openly labored over the question of whether to arm the Iranian people when asked if he was encouraging the public to protest, bringing up the January crackdown that saw the massacre of tens of thousands of protesters by the government.
“Well, look, the problem is you can’t — if you have five people with a gun, and 250,000 [without], the five people with a gun, assuming it’s used fast enough, which they do… they’re going to win. They have to, they don’t have weapons,” Trump said.
He then brought up the thousands of unarmed protesters who were killed in December and January.
“They lost 42,000, to be exact. 42,000 people in about a two-week period. Protesters, innocent, unarmed protesters,” Trump said. “So we’re not dealing with, you know, your typical people.”
The president then shifted his perspective, suggesting that the U.S. could obliterate the rest of the Iranian military in the first few hours of the resumption of hostilities, despite Tehran having used the ceasefire to partially reconstitute its forces.
The interview shifted away from the question, but Trump returned to the issue of arming Iranians later on when asked who would benefit from taking Iran’s oil.
“The people of Iran, so look, if they had guns, which they don’t have, if they had guns, you know, guns were sent, and other people took those guns,” he said, referring to claims that Kurdish militants had taken the weapons for themselves. “If they had guns, they would fight back. I’m convinced of that. But you know, you can’t have an unarmed population against people with AK-47’s and stand there, even if you have 250,000 people.”
“So you know, you started it off by asking me, ‘Would I like to see them [armed]?’ And I’m very torn on it, because they lost 42,000 people in the first two weeks,” Trump continued. “I don’t really want to see that. They have to have guns. And I think they’re getting some guns. As soon as they have guns, they’ll fight like, as good as anybody there is.”
Previous reports claimed that Trump disagreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion to arm the Iranian people to facilitate an armed uprising, fearful that the unorganized populace wouldn’t stand a chance against the well-disciplined Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Trump’s next comments suggested that his calculations had changed, privy to the structural and financial pressure being exerted on the Guard.
“They have very good weapons on the other side … now they’ve been depleted,” he said. “A lot of the people fighting don’t want to fight anymore. They’re not getting paid anymore from what I’m hearing, because we have obliterated them like, in the military, we’ve done the same thing to them financially, economically. We don’t think they’re paying their soldiers and their Guard anymore.”
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“So they’ve got a lot of problems, but we’ll see what happens,” Trump added. “We have all the cards. We have all the cards.”
Monday saw the first major violations of the weekslong ceasefire, with Iran firing a large missile barrage against the United Arab Emirates, and U.S. and Iranian forces exchanging fire in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump said he wouldn’t say whether the ceasefire was still holding.