No, Iran didn’t deliberately avoid hitting a U.S. base, as Trump claims

Washington Post -Nov 15th 2023

“You remember they [Iran] fired. They hit one of our drones and I hit them. …. They called us to tell us that we’re going to hit back. Here’s the target, but we’re not going to hit the target. We’re going to just miss it. It’s a military base.”

Former president Donald Trump, in an interview with Univision, streamed Nov. 10

In his hour-long interview with Univision, the former president offered a tale of relations with Iran so startling that it begged to be explored. In his telling, the United States retaliated after Iran destroyed an American drone, and then when Iran decided to hit back, it purposely missed a U.S. military base. Not only that, Iranian officials called Trump and let their plans be known, apparently out of respect for him.

“It was quite an evening,” Trump recounted. “And they sent in 18 drones. Five of them self-destructed. The rest of them essentially missed the base. They were outside the base in areas where there weren’t [people]. Nobody was killed — with all of that, you know, being out there. But they called us. They call me and … this is Iran. This is,you know, this is Iran who’s supposed to be so hostile. They respected us. And I respect them.”

Were Trump and Iran’s supreme leader on speed dial with each other? Trump’s account “is complete nonsense,” said former Trump national security adviser John R. Bolton, who vividly recounted the first drone incident in his critical memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

Little else that Trump said is correct either. As Bolton put it in an interview, “It’s about five or six things mixed together and reported inaccurately.”

The Facts

As we learned during his presidency, Trump is not detailed-oriented and struggles to recount events with precision. He places himself at the center of action, a superhero president whom opponents respect or cower before, and the outcomes are always perfect. Whether he convinces himself the fake stories are true — or whether he deliberately tells falsehoods — is always open to question.

In this case, there was an Iranian attack on a U.S. drone in 2019 — but Trump did not hit back. He lost his nerve at the last minute, according to various news accounts. Then there was an Iranian attack on a U.S. military base in 2020. It involved missiles, not drones. No one was killed, though more than 100 service members suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

Let’s explore each incident in turn.

“They hit one of our drones and I hit them.”

On June 19, 2019, Iran shot down its second U.S. drone, a $150 million RQ-4A Global Hawk, in two weeks. The U.S. military said the drone had been operating in international airspace. Trump’s top national security advisers unanimously recommended that the United States answer back with attacks on three military facilities. According to Bolton’s book, Trump and his aides discussed possible casualties — he was told they would be small given the hour of the planned attack, though it might include Russians — and then Trump briefed congressional leaders about what was coming. He also tweeted: “Iran made a big mistake!”