President Donald Trump told the New York Post Monday that Operation Epic Fury is progressing “ahead of schedule” with the elimination of top-ranking Iranian officials and that he would not rule out sending boots on the ground if he felt “they were necessary.”

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

While he indicated that he expected the operation to last four weeks, he also said he believed it could be even shorter than that in a separate interview with the Daily Mail.

“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”

Trump dismissed concerns about Iranian retaliation involving terrorism.

“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said. He added that the decision to strike was made when it became clear that Iran was exploiting the negotiations to secretly accelerate work on achieving a nuclear weapon.

“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back,” he said.

“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent,” the president said. “They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”

“I said, ‘Let’s go,’” he concluded.

Polling on the Iran war is not favorable, showing 27 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval, with 29 percent unsure. Despite the negative polling, Trump insisted that most Americans support the strikes.

He said he has to do what’s right and not follow the polling, arguing that a regional conflict is far better than the disastrous consequences that would result from “crazy people” acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” he said.