Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced backlash this weekend for his latest chest-thumping rhetoric about the Iran war, which was condemned on social media as “sickening” and “grotesque.”
Hegseth was asked on Sunday’s broadcast of “60 Minutes” whether he believed U.S. troops face increased danger following a report that Russia helped Iran with intelligence that could potentially be used to target them.
“No one’s putting us in danger,” Hegseth answered. “We’re putting the other guys in danger. That’s our job. So we’re not concerned about that.”
He then said: “The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live.”
The remark was slammed on social media, where critics accused the self-described war secretary of yet again using inflammatory rhetoric about the conflict.
MS NOW’s Chris Hayes argued that “purely in propaganda terms it seems to me, admittedly just an amateur observer when it comes to war fighting, that it may be useful to send the message to the 91+ million Iranian civilians that we are not trying to kill them.”