The email was sent before Trump threatened new airstrikes against Iran and then relented, over the weekend, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other Gulf leaders talked him out of it. Among the plans were attacking Pickaxe Mountain and other Iranian sites reportedly housing nuclear equipment or material.<\/p>\n
Those sites are deep underground, however, and would have likely required deploying American ground troops, which Trump is trying to avoid. Eighteen American service members have been killed in the war, according to official counts, and the administration has been criticized for its lack of transparency on military casualties.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, POTUS will want a deal, so he\u2019ll continually look for ways to get tough and get out of this,\u201d an unnamed source told CNN. \u201cYou need creative minds at times\u2014especially if you\u2019re running out of conventional options.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The email was sent before Trump threatened new airstrikes against Iran and then relented, over the weekend, after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":842212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-842211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=842211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/842211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/842212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=842211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=842211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=842211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}