TEHRAN — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is struggling to control the message around its rapidly escalating war with Iran, offering mixed and often contradictory statements as the conflict widens. What began as a show of force has quickly turned into a crisis with global consequences, revealing confusion inside the U.S. and raising serious questions about the goals, planning, and direction of the operation.

The U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran on February 28 in a bid to weaken the country and reshape its leadership structure in their favor. The first day of the military campaign began with what Western media calls political and military decapitation: top Iranian military commanders and Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei were assassinated in a strike in Tehran. So far, not only military sites but also residential areas have been targeted, leading to the deaths of over 1,400 people and injuries to more than 18,500, according to Iran’s Health Ministry on Friday.

In a public statement, President Trump had warned that a “nuclear war” would have broken out if Iran had not been confronted. His comments contradict his claim in June 2025, when he ordered the U.S. military to bomb three nuclear facilities in Iran after Israel launched a war on Iran days earlier. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he said on June 21 last year. It is clear that since last June’s war, Iran has not enriched uranium.

               People hold signs and a banner at an anti-war protest in Times Square in New York City

Trump has also argued that negotiations with Iran to scale back its nuclear program had been fruitless. This came even as Iran and the U.S. had been scheduled to hold a new round of talks in Vienna, and the top Omani diplomat mediating the indirect Tehran–Washington negotiations said a peace deal was within reach.

“A peace deal is within our reach … if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there,” Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi said in an interview with CBS News in Washington, DC, last month after Oman brokered the third round of indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran in Geneva. He added, “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing on a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved before.”

A similar scenario unfolded last year: Tehran and Washington were scheduled to hold a new round of talks, but two days before the meeting, Israel launched a war on Iran on June 13, and the U.S. later joined.

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the ongoing U.S. attack was launched because “we knew there was going to be an Israeli action” against Iran, though he later backtracked.

As Iran answered the opening strikes with a level of force Washington had not anticipated, the gap between U.S. expectations and battlefield reality became impossible to ignore. Another major miscalculation has become increasingly clear: The U.S. was not prepared for Iran’s move to restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz. Washington was caught off guard by the speed and scale of Iran’s response. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has said it will not allow “aggressors” to move “a litre of oil” through the Strait of Hormuz, as rising energy prices ripple through the global economy as a result of the U.S.–Israeli aggression.

 A protester holds signs against the U.S.–Israel conflict with Iran near the U.S. consulate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on March 7, 2026. (Kyaw Soe Oo/Reuters)

Analysts say the U.S. had assumed Iran would avoid such a move, leaving American planners scrambling to address a crisis they had not anticipated.

With the air raids now in full force —it appears the U.S.-Israeli military objective has not been met. President Trump has said the U.S. has dismantled Iran’s military capabilities, but Iran’s continued strikes on Israel and its attacks on U.S. bases in Persian Gulf countries, which have intensified over the past two days, indicate that the U.S. has failed to destroy Iran’s military capacity. On Wednesday, Trump claimed that “we won” the war, though he added that U.S. forces would remain engaged to “finish the job.” He asserted—without evidence—that the war may end “soon” because there is “practically nothing left” to bomb.

Adding to the administration’s increasingly chaotic messaging, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday delivered remarks that further muddied the waters. Hegseth spent much of his prepared statement attacking the press for publishing stories he labeled “fake news.” He insisted that Iranian attacks were diminishing, claiming that Iran’s ballistic missile launches had decreased by 90 percent since the opening days of the war and that Tehran’s use of one-way attack drones had dropped by 95 percent. His comments appeared aimed at projecting confidence and control—yet they stood in stark contrast to ongoing Iranian strikes which have grown more forceful. Instead of clarifying the situation, Hegseth’s remarks added another layer of contradiction to an already disjointed narrative.

Yet even these assurances are contradicted by U.S. intelligence. According to three sources cited by Reuters, recent assessments conclude that Iran’s leadership remains stable and firmly in control. One official familiar with the findings said the latest review shows the government “is not in danger” and continues to retain public control. Israeli officials, the sources added, have also acknowledged that there is no guarantee the war will lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. 

It appears President Trump is trying to create the perception of progress while the reality suggests otherwise. Military and political analyst Elijah Magnier told Al Jazeera that the U.S. was not prepared for the war to last as long as it has, as the conflict enters its third week. “I think this is a very difficult moment because the Americans did not foresee such a war lasting so long and the reaction of the Iranians and allies…. The Americans did not expect such damage inflicted on all bases in the Middle East. The Iranian reaction against the Strait of Hormuz was also not foreseen at such a scale …” he said.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson also told Al Jazeera that the U.S. has failed to define clear objectives for the war. Listening to Trump and Hegseth, “one doesn’t know what the objectives are,” Wilkerson said.

This comes amid growing discontent in the U.S. over the war on Iran, particularly after a deadly U.S. missile attack on a school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, which killed nearly 170 people, most of them students. Several U.S. cities have seen protests against the war. Polls show that the conflict is broadly unpopular among the American public: a Quinnipiac University survey on March 9 found that over 50 percent of voters oppose the military offensive and 74 percent reject any move to send U.S. ground troops. Similar results appeared in an Ipsos poll, where 43 percent disapproved of the U.S. strikes compared with 29 percent who approved.

A U.S. missile strike on a school in the southern Iranian city of Minab killed 168; most of them children

Likewise, forty Democratic senators wrote to the U.S. Department of Defense on Wednesday asking for answers about civilian casualties in Iran, including the missile strike on the Minab elementary school. Among them, Senator Raphael Warnock said that the killing of schoolchildren in Iran “should shock our conscience and cause us to recoil in horror.” He called for accountability and lessons learned from the tragedy. “A nation whose leaders can so easily shrug off the death of children, no matter the cause, is in need of moral repair,” Warnock said in a social media post.

Furthermore, more than 250 organizations signed a letter calling on the U.S. Congress to halt funding for the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, following revelations from administration officials who told Congress on Tuesday that the first six days of the war had already cost more than $11 billion. Several congressional aides expect the White House to soon request additional funding—possibly as much as $50 billion.

“The $11.3 billion spent on the first six days of the war would, for example, be enough to restore food benefits to four million people,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. “More money for the Pentagon will serve to extend and escalate an illegal, unpopular, and devastating war—as well as pave the way for still more Pentagon funding requests,” Weissman added.

Twelve independent UN human rights experts have also issued a joint statement condemning the U.S.-Israeli strikes as “flagrant violations of international law.” “[The U.S.] and Israel should stop waging and expanding wars, and considering themselves as above international legality,” said the experts, including Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory.

These developments unfold as Israeli and U.S. casualties rise amid Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Israeli public broadcaster Kan News reported on Friday that more than two dozen people were injured in the latest Iranian missile strikes. Israel seeks to conceal the scale of damage, imposing restrictions on journalists. 

The U.S. follows the same approach. The United States is facing growing questions over its military losses following a series of aircraft incidents and rising casualties. The latest was the crash of a KC-135 refueling aircraft in western Iraq, which killed six crew members. CENTCOM says the cause is under investigation and denies hostile or friendly fire, noting that a second aircraft involved landed safely. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has claimed it shot down the tanker, contradicting U.S. statements.

This incident follows earlier losses, including three F-15E jets that the U.S. says were mistakenly downed by Kuwaiti air defenses on March 1, bringing U.S. aircraft losses to four since February 28. With at least eight personnel dead and more than 140 wounded, questions continue to grow about the true scale of U.S. casualties in the conflict.

For now, the developments demonstrate the miscalculations of the Trump administration. This is an administration in disarray. There was no planning, preparation, or clear objective. U.S. officials’ statements are contradictory, inarticulate, and ill-informed. They were not expecting Iran to fight back.

Now it is about stemming a crisis that threatens to collapse the world economy and bring misery to the people who voted for Trump.