Epic flurry: How Trump’s words on Iran have yo-yoed over three weeks of war

(Zachary B. Wolf, Boer Deng, Dugald McConnell, Austin Culpepper – CNN) Over the course of nearly a month since the first US strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump has yo-yoed from demanding “unconditional surrender” to teasing a possible detente. Confusion has become a mark of this war. Trump has dubiously claimed Iran posed an “imminent” threat to the US, months after declaring the US had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities. He’s given a multitude of reasons for launching a war in the first place. He has declared victory scores of times, only to qualify those claims later on. He has demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender and suggested he already won the war. Then he announced over the weekend that he held “productive” talks with Iran. Though the country’s foreign ministry at first denied Trump’s claim, the Iranians later acknowledged that the US initiated conversations. Now, 1,000 US soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division are preparing to deploy to the Middle East after Trump repeatedly refused to say if ground troops would be necessary. We took a comprehensive look at what Trump has said publicly over the past three weeks about “Operation Epic Fury” as he appears to be trying to justify an expanding war to Americans in hindsight. – Epic flurry: How Trump has shifted his stances on Iran repeatedly | CNN Politics