Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced backlash and mockery Thursday over a speech about the war with Iran in which he railed against what he called the “dumb, politically correct wars of the past” and insisted the timeline of the U.S.-Israeli military operations is “ours and ours alone to control.”
“The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here,” Hegseth boasted at a news conference in Tampa, adding that previous conflicts had “vague objectives with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement.”
“No more,” he declared.
Hegseth also bragged about the scale of U.S. military power involved in the conflict and said: “We set the tempo. We set the timeline,” a line that some social media users suggested meant Americans were being dragged into yet another forever war.
Other critics, meanwhile, asked exactly what a politically correct war was ― and accused him of sloganeering and empty rhetoric.
