John Kirby, top spokesman for the National Security Council.
John, thank you for joining us again this morning.
What is a proportionate response to this?
The president's working his way through that right now.
George had a good meeting yesterday with his entire national
security team.
They laid out some options.
He's weighing that obviously, as you heard him say yesterday
in South Carolina,
We will respond. We'll do that in a time,
in a manner of our choosing,
to see what we can do to help bring these
attacks to an end and make sure that we can
protect our troops and facilities.
Question is the target of that strike the Iranians are
trying to distance themselves from?
This is striking inside Iran on the table.
Again, I don't want to get ahead of the president's
decision space,
George. He's going to have options to look at as
commander in chief and he'll make the right decision.
We're not looking for a broader war in the region.
We certainly aren't looking for a a conflict with Iran.
But make no mistake, Iran is supporting these groups that
are resourcing them,
training them. You know, certainly not discouraging these attacks at
all.
We know they support the Houthis,
Hezbollah, Hamas. They are definitely causing a lot of these
attacks to happen.
We just, we're going to work through the right options
here and make the right decision.
But deterrence does not seem to be working right now.
The question then would be how big must this strike
be?
How quickly should it come?
Again, all of those are the kinds of questions that
that the national security team is asking itself right now,
and the president is certainly asking of them.
He's going to have to weigh what the options are
going to be.
There will be a response.
This was a consequential attack,
no question about it. And our thoughts and prayers go
to the families that got the worst possible news over
the weekend.
So he's going to take that very,
very seriously. We'll make, he'll make the right decision.
But again, George will, he'll do it at a time
in a manner of our choosing.
And of course this comes as the CIA director is
in Paris in these negotiations over some kind of ceasefire
in Gaza,
getting the hostages home, worried that this retaliation now could
complicate those talks.
I won't get ahead of the talks themselves.
We're going to keep having these discussions,
George. And we believe that the discussions thus far have
been sober.
They've been serious. They've actually been constructive.
I don't want to sound too sanguine here.
It's not like we have a deal that's imminent and
ready to be announced.
But we still believe that even given the weekends events,
that these talks should go forward.
We should try to get a hostage deal in place
so we can get them those hostages home with their
families,
but also be able to get a pause in the
fighting of a significant enough duration that civilian casualties can
go down and humanitarian assistance can be increased into Gaza.
What do we know about the condition of the hostages
right now,
including the Americans? We don't have perfect visibility on all
of them,
George. I mean, we know there's more than 100 hostages
that Hamas or PIJ that Palestinian Islamic Jihad is holding.
We don't have perfect visibility on exactly where they are,
what condition they're in. We're trying to get as much
information as we can.
We don't have any reason to suspect that the remaining
6 American hostages are not still alive.
But again, we don't have perfect information.
John Kirby, thanks as always.