ISTANBUL

Recent US attacks on Iran show President Donald Trump doing a U-turn from his previous pledges, a prominent right-wing journalist said Friday.

"I think that this war is something that he promised he wouldn't do, not once but countless times," said Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News commentator and sometimes Trump supporter.

"The idea behind it is not only contrary to America first. It may be its inverse," said Carlson, who now posts his shows via US social media platform X.

Claiming that a regime change in Iran would benefit the US, Carlson said no one disputes this.

But he criticized Trump’s claims that an Iranian attack on the US was imminent, saying: "I've heard … the kind of tiresome fear-mongering about nuclear weapons, which Iran did not have. It's insulting actually, even to make that argument to me that Iran's nuclear program posed such a threat to the US three weeks ago that we had to launch a full-scale war against them.”

Echoing other press reports, he said Washington started the war because Israel wanted them to do it, adding that Tel Aviv chose the timing.

"We put Israel's interests before ours," he added, saying that it was Trump that US voters elected president, not Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Trump should have pushed back, as previous presidents have done to some very limited extent. George W. Bush didn't push back. We went up in the Iraq War. Now everyone pretends that was nothing to do with Israel. I was there. I was talking to Bush."

"That's not true," he claimed.

The Iraq war of 2003-2011 became notorious for having been launched on unfounded US claims that then-leader Saddam Hussein’s government had developed “weapons of mass destruction.”