Were the U.S. military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend a success? It’s too early for anyone to say for sure, yet of course they were a success — because Donald Trump ordered them. In fact, they were on par with the most spectacular bombing the world has ever seen, and anyone who suggests otherwise is “scum”!
While Trump has repeatedly said the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear-enrichment facilities, on Tuesday afternoon CNN and the New York Times reported that may not be the case. The source: a leaked U.S. intelligence early assessment. CNN said:
The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by seven people briefed on it.
The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said …
Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes.
CNN noted that analysis of the site is ongoing and that the assessment “could change as more intelligence becomes available.” Neither report says U.S. fighter pilots botched their mission or disparages members of the military in any way. Iran’s nuclear facilities are simply a difficult target. As the Times reported, “Current and former military officials had cautioned before the strike that any effort to destroy the Fordo facility, which is buried more than 250 feet under a mountain, would probably require waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.”
But “we don’t know yet” does not fit with the idea that all Trump does is win. So rather than taking these nuances into account, Trump spent Wednesday morning smearing the reporters who relayed this initial conclusion from the Defense Intelligence Agency and insisting the Iran bombings were a great success. Or rather, the greatest bombing success in history, on par with the atomic bombings that ended World War II.
“That hit [on Iran] ended the war. That hit ended the war,” Trump said during a meeting with NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte. “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war, this ended the war.”
Despite saying he didn’t want to make the Hiroshima and Nagasaki comparison, Trump repeated this claim a short time later at a NATO press conference. (And, of course, he did not note that the bombings killed 210,000 people in addition to ending World War II.)
Throughout the two NATO events, Trump confusingly acknowledged that we don’t really know if the strikes were effective, while insisting they were definitely a total success.
“Well, the intelligence was very inconclusive,” Trump said. “The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct. But I think we can take the ‘We don’t know’ — it was very severe. It was obliteration.”
But Trump was quite clear on one point: He’s disgusted with the media for reporting on the outcome of the strikes rather than just praising the people who carried them out:
Even as CNN’s Kelly O’Donnell tried to explain that no one is “demeaning” the troops, Trump depicted the reporting as a personal attack on them.
“You know what? You should be praising those people,” Trump said. “By trying to go and get me, you’re hurting those people. They were devastated. You know, I got a call from Missouri … I got a call that the pilots and the people on the plane were devastated because they were trying to minimize the attack.”
Ironically, Trump’s comments were a bit demeaning to the pilots as he made it sound as if they can’t handle people discussing a fact-based assessment of their mission conducted by the Pentagon. Their commander-in-chief might have been projecting his own emotional fragility.
More on Politics
- Poll Shows Public Knows Little About Trump’s Ugly Megabill
- Trump Betrayed His Base With the Big Beautiful Bill, and the GOP Will Regret It
- No President Has Ever Had Something Like Trump’s Megabill
