‘I wouldn’t call it a war,’ Vance says after Iran hostilities flare

Vice President Vance said Thursday that he wouldn’t call the military operation between the U.S. and Iran “a war,” despite the eruption of hostilities this week.

“I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting. I recognize there have been places where this has flared up,” he said during the press briefing.

The back-and-forth military strikes this week marked the largest outbreak of fighting in weeks, following a month of relative calm. On Tuesday, the U.S. military carried out roughly 100 strikes against Iranian targets for what it described as retaliation for threats in the Strait of Hormuz.

Vance said it was ultimately up to Iran as to when the fighting would end completely.

“You’re asking me a question like when will the Iranians stop shooting at ships?” he said. “I think the reality is I don’t know the answer to that question. You would have to ask the Iranians.”

He said the U.S. would not rely “on the Iranians behaving responsibly or negotiating in good faith, what we’re going to do is use the tools that we have at our disposal to ensure that the American people, one, never have to deal with the threat of an Iranian nuclear program, and two, that world energy markets are properly supplied.”

The vice president also said he was “extremely skeptical” of reports from Iranian officials that a U.S. missile strike killed at least four civilians at a home in southern Iran where people were celebrating a wedding.

“I will say that the Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far, so I’m extremely skeptical of this,” Vance said. “What I can say with 100 percent confidence is that, unlike the IRGC [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps], the United States never targets civilians in combat.”

He said he had been briefed on the incident and an investigation into it was ongoing.

“We never will do that,” he said of specifically targeting civilians. “We never have done that, and unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen, but in this particular case, I don’t think that we have any information one way or the other.”

Vance also addressed an NBC News report that cyberattacks from Iran have targeted U.S. infrastructure.

“What I would say is that we feel quite confident the homeland is safe,” Vance said. “We also feel quite confident that the Iranians are going to try to do a lot of things that they don’t have the capability to do, and that the American people should know that your government is obsessively focused on both anticipating any potential cyber threats but also responding to them appropriately and ensuring they don’t happen.”

He said he would be “much more worried about cyberattacks from other actors.”

NBC News reported Wednesday that Iranian hackers have targeted U.S. water systems, telecommunications, energy and other infrastructure.

The attempted attacks have not been successful, sources told the outlet, and have focused on automated systems connected to the internet.