Today I’m seeing articles in many news outlets questioning the efficacy of President Trump’s attacks on the Iranian nuclear development facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At Commentary Seth Mandel tackles them head-on:
CNN reported one US intelligence assessment concluded that Iran’s nuclear program has only been set back a few months. The New York Times soon followed with a nearly identical piece.
There are no specifics in either piece. We don’t know—and it’s clear the reporters do not know—which sites they are relaying quotes about. And there’s a strange, or maybe not so strange, unwillingness to note that the assessment in question, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, was made with “low confidence”—which is code for “we don’t really know what happened so we’re going to guess, kind of.”
He goes on to quote David Albright’s WSJ interview.
So now we’re bickering over whether the attacks accomplished their objective or not. My opinion is that nobody knows and will not know for some time if ever.
One of the things that strikes me is that from some of his published remarks it’s reasonable to infer that President Trump is receiving Israeli intelligence and has more confidence in it than U. S. intelligence which IMO is a sad commentary.
It appears that both the American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities and Iran’s strike on our airbase in Qatar were theater, designed to save face all around.
But Iran’s missile attacks on Israel were successful, and caused a lot of damage. Israel’s air defenses, American designed and largely made, are not able to deal with modern missiles, just as the American and European made air defenses in Ukraine.
If it was time limited and really needed to be kept secret maybe it makes sense, but in this case we have known since shortly after Trump eliminated the JCPOA that Iran had started enriching uranium. He had no evidence they were actually trying to make a bomb. (They had 25,000 pounds they gave up in 2015 they didnt try to make a bomb with.) Anyway, what was a secret here? Trump had already announced he was going to bomb. Israel was already bombing. There was lots of time to present this to Congress. Would Congress make a decision is another issue. I dont think they want to in general.
Steve