Trump says he rejected Iran uranium raid to avoid ‘Jimmy Carter’ moment

President Donald Trump said he considered sending US special operations forces to retrieve Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile, but rejected the idea because the mission would require weeks inside a war zone and risk becoming a “Jimmy Carter” moment.

"I didn't want to be Jimmy Carter. I didn't feel like being Jimmy Carter, so that topic we did. Well, we thought about it right at the very beginning, before you saw, before we did what we did, what before we destroyed their entire military. We thought about it, and I didn't want to be in a position where you had been here to get there," he told reporters at the White House.

"It's not like it's not like Venezuela, like you go in, you're there for a matter of minutes and you're out and everybody's waving goodbye as you, and you brought the cargo to be there for two weeks, you need massive equipment to airlift the equipment, and you're in a war zone."

"There was a time at the very beginning when we thought about doing that, because they would have not been watching, but they would have found out."