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One saving grace that might have helped mitigate the Iraqi outrage, one American official said, was that the Iraqi Parliament was not in session, perhaps sparing Washington even greater fury.

“Our troops are in Iraq to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS,” a senior administration official said on Monday, in a conference call with reporters ahead of a meeting this week in Washington with representatives of the nearly 80 countries that belong to the coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and several other countries where the organization has offshoots.

Mr. Trump seemed to have stepped on a diplomatic hornet’s nest inadvertently, American diplomats and military experts said, when he discussed the nature of the sprawling Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq, which he visited in late December and referred to on Sunday, and where American troops operate with Iraqi permission. He suggested Americans could use the base to carry out surveillance of Iran.

“We have a base in Iraq and the base is a fantastic edifice,” Mr. Trump said in the CBS interview. “I was there recently, and I couldn’t believe the money that was spent on these massive runways.”

American military and intelligence officials expressed bafflement at Mr. Trump’s claim that United States forces at Al Asad, or at most any other Iraqi base, could take a leading role in monitoring Iran’s nuclear program or other suspicious activities.

Such intelligence collection is typically conducted by a combination of American spy satellites, electronic intercepts collected by the National Security Agency and possibly covert operations by C.I.A. spies.

Mr. Trump’s visit to Al Asad in December provoked similar anger from Iraqi politicians, some of whom called it an arrogant affront that recalled American behavior dating back to the 2003 invasion and what followed: the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison; incidents with civilian casualties; and widespread sectarian violence.