White House reporter Mark Caputo details the third week of conflict in Iran, noting $12 billion spent without an official "war" label despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's past push to rename the department. Trump aims to destroy missile capabilities and sink the navy while securing Karg Island, which handles 90% of Iran's oil revenue. Although the U.S. and Israel share goals, Israel prioritizes decapitation strikes against IRGC officials. Callers warn that Iranian leadership will regroup like cockroaches and urge immediate action before autumn elections shift congressional control, highlighting fears over Iran's space capabilities and proxy funding. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're joined now by Mark Caputo.
He is White House reporter for Axios.
Mark, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me.
So the war in Iran is at its entering its third week.
What is the mood?
What's the feeling inside the White House right now?
I think both optimism, frustration, and concern at the same time.
Optimism because they have the data, they say, from the Pentagon that shows all of their targets are being hit.
And according to them, they're ahead of schedule.
Lots of missile silos and drone factories and the like being blown up.
And the Iranian Navy is at the bottom of the water.
So that's the optimism part.
The frustration is with a lot of the reporting that and a lot of the commentary on social media that indicates Trump might have gotten himself into a quagmire and what's being commonly called an escalation trap.
And then the concern is obviously the Strait of Hormuz, which has closed and causing gas prices, oil prices, and therefore gas prices to rise.
If you mix those three things together, I think that sums up the mood of Donald Trump and this White House revolves so strongly around Donald Trump that it also describes not just the mood of the White House, but also the administration itself.
Now, regarding the Strait of Hormuz and the rising gas prices, was there, according to your reporting, was there preparation for that?
Was there knowledge that, I mean, this is what Iran is going to do and this is what's going to be the result of it?
I mean, they say there was, and it would make sense that there was.
There is an open question about how carefully those plans were made, how widely they were shared, and how quickly a good plan was implemented.
And I don't really have answers to those questions, but certainly there is some reporting out there that Trump is frustrated with sort of the pace of this being closed and the fact that other countries aren't helping out.
Now he has called on them.
He called on them Saturday to help out an international coalition.
And the White House tells us, told the Wall Street Journal first, that he expects, Donald Trump expects that he will be able to announce what they're calling a Hormuz coalition of other countries to help escort vessels through the Strait of Hormuz and get more oil to the global market.
And when we say escorting through the Strait of Hormuz, I mean it could be mined.
So how does that work militarily?
I mean, it doesn't help you to have a military escort if there's a mine in the water.
Well, certainly it doesn't help, especially if the military escort itself gets blown up.
And that's one of the great fears of this White House, perhaps of any Defense Department, is you don't want a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment sunk with a relatively cheap mine.
So exactly what this looks like and at what point they think it's clear is a great question.
One of the reasons I think you haven't seen more action faster and more of these ships running through the strait is out of this concern.
There are allegedly, or we are told there are minesweepers there.
There is also reporting that some old minesweepers that were in the region and were scheduled to be decommissioned were pulled out of the region right before the war.
And that's leading some people to think that the planning wasn't so great.
What we do know in the short term is there is this chess game now happening between Washington and Tehran.
There's some reporting was from CNN that Tehran has said will open the straits, or at least one official said from the Iranian government, that they'll open the strait, but only to cargo oil cargo that is transaction in transacted in Shannian and not in U.S. dollars.
Most, if not all, petrol contracts and oil contracts are used with the U.S. dollars, which is sort of the world currency, so to speak.
And China, Iran, and a number of other countries, the BRICS countries, are trying to break that log jam.
And so Iran sees this as an opportunity to do that.
If you'd like to join our conversation with Mark Caputo, he's a White House reporter for Axios.
You can start calling in now.
Democrats are on 2027 for eight eight thousand.
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Mark, there's a lot of conversation about the word war.
Sometimes we use war, sometimes we use conflict.
Is the White House calling this a war?
The White House officially isn't, but then the president does at different times.
So, you know, it's a war.
It's also a conflict.
And, you know, pick your poison here.
But the United States is spending something on the order or had spent on the order in the first 14 days or so, about $12 billion, expending all of his expensive ordnance, missiles, bombs, and spending it on the planes that have to take off and the personnel to staff the various military bases and the aircraft carriers and related strike groups.
So sure looks like a war to the people who are getting blown up, and it looks like a war to everyone else.
And whether the White House officially wants to admit that or not, who knows?
There is an irony, obviously, that Pete Hegseth was among those who insisted that the Department of Defense be renamed the War Department.
He constantly talks about warfighters, and now that war is going on, he's among those who are suggesting, like, well, this isn't war.
But then other times, he has said war is hell.
So, whatever, it is what it is.
It's a war.
It's a conflict.
And the ending of it is unclear at the moment.
And the justification is sometimes shifting.
At least that's what the criticism of the administration is.
I'm going to play you, Secretary Hegseth, and also.
So this is Secretary Hegseth from March 3rd and then President Trump last Monday about the justification.
So these are about a week apart, and then I'll get your comment.
The campaign has seven times the intensity of Israel's previous operations against Iran during the 12-day war.
Seven times.
And as President Trump said, more and larger waves are coming.
We are just getting started.
We are accelerating, not decelerating.
Iran's capabilities are evaporating by the hour while American strength grows fiercer, smarter, and utterly dominant.
More bombers and more fighters are arriving just today.
Our country is doing really well.
I mean, at a level that nobody thought.
We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil.
And I think you'll see it's going to be a short-term excursion.
How good is our military, right?
Amazing.
How good.
Short-term.
Short-term.
Comments.
I'm sorry, I didn't catch that first part of your question.
I was just saying, what do you make of those two comments from the Secretary and from the President?
Well, notably, the Secretary of War talked about the 12-day war and how this current conflict is expending more ordnance.
So by his own definition, this is a war.
I do have to say that one thing the administration has been consistent about, the president, not so much, but he said on the opening of the conflict of the war on February 28th that there are four objectives, military objectives for this action conflict, this war.
One was destroying the missiles and missile capability of Iran.
Two was sinking the Iranian Navy, just basically rendering it obsolete.
Three was eliminating its nuclear threat.
And four was eliminating Iran's ability and network of funding terrorist proxies in the region.
That was it.
Those are the four military objectives.
He also then laid out an additional one for the people of Iran to do to rise up and effectuate regime change.
Now, Trump at different times, he's taking reporter calls all the times.
He goes on stage and at press conferences and goes off message and off script and says what he wants.
But time and again, the administration refers back to those four objectives as the four things that will define this conflict and how the administration defines success in it and when it ultimately sort of withdraws.
And I would say withdraws from this phase of the conflict.
This is going to be probably an ongoing thing in Iran because, well, it has been for quite some time.
Obviously, the 12-day war was last week.
So when you look at the broader context of what Trump is trying to do, he's sort of laser focused or the military, I should say, is laser focused on those things.
But as he sort of talked about an excursion, there are different things that crop up in war that change the tactical reality of the battle plan.
And as a result, you've got these two sort of major things that have arisen.
One is the Strait of Hormuz, which we've discussed.
The other is Karg Island.
It's 16 miles off the shore of Iran.
It handles about 90% of its oil.
And the president is eyeing whether to greenlight a takeover, a seizure, which would be boots on the ground of the small island of that strategically important and financially lucrative island for Iran, in the view of the Trump administration, that if they were able to take this, it would be sort of an economic knockout blow to Iran.
I mean, 90% of its oil, it produces about $78 billion a year in revenue.
That's half of the budget for Iran.
And if the United States controlled that, it would give the U.S. a leg up.
Now, this is one theory.
It doesn't mean the president is going to do that.
In the short term, we're told he's going to try to focus more on this Hormuz coalition and hope that that sort of works out and obviates the need to invade or to try to seize Karg Island.
But that's on the menu of options for Donald Trump.
And on Friday, he did announce and did show after green lighting a bombing raid on Carg Island where they took out or appeared to take out the military installations there, but left all of the oil infrastructure.
So they're sort of softening it up for that inevitability if that actually happens.
If I shouldn't say inevitability, that possibility if Donald Trump decides to move forward with that.
And Mark, as far as you know, are the U.S. and the Israelis still on the same page as far as the aims of the war go and the timeline?
The United States and Israel have similar aims, but the Israelis seem, we are told, much more interested in regime change than the United States administration.
So Israel has told its local press, the press in Israel, that they have killed thousands of top military officials, IRGC officials, and regime officials in this effort to just attempt to decapitate and re-decapitate this government and this leadership structure they have in Iran.
One of the complicating things is what Iran calls this mosaic defense doctrine, which sort of diffuses and decentralizes a lot of power to survive decapitation strikes.
It makes it more difficult for them to have a clear chain of command and command and control, but it makes it sort of easier for them to operate in an environment like this where their Ayatollah was killed and 40 other leaders were killed and the opening day of the United States and Israel airstrikes on Iran.
At the same time, though, it enables them to sort of continue on in this environment.
And so far, I can't say that it's necessarily working.
I can't say it's not working, but the United States is having, or Trump has expressed some difficulty in having discussions with Iran, thinking that, well, you know, who are we really talking to?
Yes, they've appointed a new Ayatollah, but in the view of the United States, that Ayatollah doesn't really have half or nearly as much power as his father did.
Let's talk to callers now.
We'll start on the independent line in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
Patrick, you're on the air.
Yeah, good morning.
I've been watching your program now for the last several months, the three of us here, and I really enjoy hearing the comments from people.
As far as the conflict here that's going on now, I have one thought.
However, it becomes resolved, whether they change the regime or not, I think it's going to be difficult, okay, because these moolahs that it's like cockroaches, you kill 20 and 50 of them come back.
I think it's going to be very difficult.
But I would make it clear to Iran after this conflict, if they are still in power and they're still funding terrorists, that any strike from one of their proxies, we're not going after them.
We're coming back after you.
Your infrastructure, your electrical grid, communications, oil refineries, everything.
If that doesn't wake them up, nothing will.
Okay, but we have to show these terrorists of will what real will is like.
And by the way, I'm unaffiliated.
I called on the independent line.
Ending Ukraine to Target Iran00:03:13
But Democrats, it's amazing.
They care more about their party than they do about the country.
All right, Patrick.
Mark, your response.
I don't hear much.
I cover the White House, so I can tell you what the White House thinks and does, but he has his political opinions and it's a free country.
Let's talk to Roderick, a Republican in Vancouver, Canada.
Good morning, Roderick.
Good morning.
I hope things are well in Washington, D.C. for you and your country people.
This is regarding the Iran conflict.
My comments and questions.
I'd like to begin, if possible, with just a brief comparator between the Ukraine conflict and what's going on in Iran.
And I hope your guest can consider this question.
There's a need to have the Iranian, in quotes, problem dealt with, and the choices, policy choices of the United States government between effectively controlling the Black Sea where the Ukraine conflict is continuing or controlling the Persian Gulf should be thought of as what is more important here.
From a Canadian perspective, it's very clear that this war against Iran had to happen now because the Trump administration, I would bet, is very concerned they may lose control of both houses of Congress in the autumn elections.
And if that happens, any ability to deal with Iran will disappear, and the next president may be a weak, far weaker president than President Trump.
Why does this matter?
Because Iran is a space, a country capable of putting satellites into space since 2009.
Once you have that capability, it's only a short skip and a jump to putting bombs, warheads, bacterial weapons, chemical weapons into the United States from Iran.
So there had to be a way of stopping, or at least attempting to stop Iran now.
And fortunately for the world, Donald Trump has taken this on.
Now, my question regarding Iran mainly regards to Karg Island and the revenues that Iran obtains via its oil exports from that island and the extremely high percentage of revenues, money, that is received by the Iran Revolutionary Guard as a result of oil sales.
The Iranian government for decades has allowed the IRGC to receive direct funds from the sale of oil rather than not even through the Iranian government mechanisms.
So if Karg Island is successfully seized or blockaded by the United States Navy, this would eliminate potentially almost all of the IRGC's funding that it's using to fight back against the American and Israeli actions today.
So question number two, first one was regarding the effectively, shouldn't we end this Ukraine conflict by, shouldn't you end it by ceasing providing weapons and intelligence to Ukraine?
IRGC Funding and War Ends00:00:31
So if that war ends, there can be focus on Iran instead.
But regarding the Iran conflict, is it in your guest's view?
You can watch this program in its entirety if you go to our website, c-span.org.
going to leave this here for live coverage of the U.S. House on C-SPAN.
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