\n<\/p>\n
By his own account, the military operation that Donald Trump mounted against Iran over the weekend was an unqualified success. Saturday\u2019s covert raid, in which U.S. bombers dropped a series of massive, tailor-made bombs onto fortified Iranian sites, left Tehran\u2019s nuclear capability \u201ccompletely and totally obliterated,\u201d the president proclaimed in a triumphant White House address late that night.<\/p>\n
The reality is more complex. Although the operation achieved an impressive level of tactical success, with a swarm of warplanes penetrating Iran unchallenged following a long, undetected flight from Missouri, it will be far harder than the president has suggested to reliably evaluate the damage inflicted on Iran\u2019s ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The information that\u2019s emerged so far suggests to experts that Iran\u2019s nuclear capacities have been set back significantly but that the two-decade atomic standoff with Iran is by no means over.<\/p>\n
In the 48 hours since the strikes, Trump\u2019s top advisers have given differing answers about the fate of Iran\u2019s stockpiles of enriched uranium, which, satellite imagery suggests, Iranian authorities may have relocated prior to the strikes. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, have given no indication that they are ready to surrender the nuclear program. Facing the likelihood of ongoing U.S. and Israeli attacks, they may be more likely to make the long-feared decision to try to race toward a bomb.<\/p>\n
Read: The United States bombed Iran. What comes next?<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is probably not the end of the program, and certainly not the end of their aspirations,\u201d Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and a top Pentagon official for the Middle East under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told us.<\/p>\n
He said that, prior to Saturday\u2019s strikes, Iran had been \u201cdays away\u201d from being able to enrich to weapons-grade levels, and had been working to shorten the time required to turn its material into a bomb. \u201cThat means that absent the U.S. and Israeli strikes, we would be sitting on a knife\u2019s edge, which was not acceptable,\u201d said Shapiro, who is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Iranian leaders, however, may now judge it necessary to abandon United Nations restrictions and rush toward weaponization to survive. \u201cAnd so there\u2019s the other side of the knife\u2019s edge, which has the potential to be even worse,\u201d Shapiro said.<\/p>\n
Since Saturday, Trump has shown little tolerance for those who have criticized the wisdom of what the Pentagon has dubbed \u201cOperation Midnight Hammer.\u201d The president\u2019s allies are now seeking to unseat Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who complained about the sidelining of Congress\u2019s constitutional authority to declare war. Trump has also pushed back against skeptical coverage in the press. \u201cThe sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,\u201d he posted today on Truth Social.<\/p>\n
His ire has even been directed at some in his own administration. According to one outside adviser, Trump has groused in private about the early assessments from those, including Vice President J. D. Vance and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, who allowed for the possibility that the Iranian sites were anything other than completely wiped out. \u201cThe president simply wants a black-and-white success,\u201d the adviser told us. (Like others interviewed for this story, the adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters).<\/p>\n
Read: American democracy might not survive war with Iran<\/p>\n
Trump has also indicated to senior aides and allies that he would prefer Saturday\u2019s strikes be a one-off rather than a sustained campaign against a country that, though weakened after 10 days of extensive bombing by Israel, retains substantial military power, according to the outside adviser and a senior White House official. The president likes the idea of a single, awe-inspiring, nuclear-facility-destroying show of force, and has expressed reluctance to go much beyond that. He has ruled out sending American troops on the ground and is mindful of the divide in his political base about a new foreign entanglement. But he has also left open the possibility of authorizing further attacks if Iran mounts any successful counteraction against the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s basking in the success and ability to do these things,\u201d another outside adviser told us. \u201cBut I don\u2019t get the impression that his appetite for prolonged military engagement has changed at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran today launched a series of missiles toward a major U.S. air base in Qatar, but U.S. military officials reported no significant damage. Afterwards, Trump derided Iran\u2019s \u201cvery weak response\u201d and announced that 13 out of 14 missiles had been shot down, while the 14th had been off target. The events suggest that, rather than escalating, military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is winding down. In the early evening, Trump posted that the U.S., Israel, and Iran have reached agreement on a cease-fire that, he said, will bring \u201can official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Iran\u2019s counterattack today, Trump had indicated privately that he would be open to letting the exchange conclude so long as no Americans were killed, either at military bases in the Middle East or in the United States at the hands of a sleeper cell, according to the senior White House official and one of the outside advisers. They told us that Trump will have less patience for American military casualties or damage to American facilities than he did five years ago, when Iran struck at a U.S. base in Iraq following Trump\u2019s decision to target the military leader Qassem Soleimani. Since the latest flare-up began, Trump has tried, with a series of social-media posts\u2014including an incendiary one about \u201cregime change\u201d\u2014to dissuade Tehran from taking action that would require a forceful response.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Iran wants the U.S. to be done, then the U.S. will be done,\u201d an American official told us, summarizing Trump\u2019s desire to take further military action only if Tehran were to pull off a significant retaliatory strike. A former U.S. intelligence officer told us that Iran\u2019s counterstrike today was more symbolic than anything: It appeared aimed at \u201cshowing that they have not been completely cowed and that they can demonstrate to their own people, to the region, to their proxies, that they can defend Iranian sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Saturday, military and intelligence officials have been rushing to collect information about the extent of the damage to Iran\u2019s nuclear program and its remaining capability. One senior Israeli official\u2014whose country has perhaps the most granular knowledge of Iran\u2019s program and the personnel involved in it\u2014told us that the impact remains unclear but that Iran\u2019s nuclear facilities have not been entirely destroyed. Assessing the damage is especially difficult because the country\u2019s known centrifuges, at Fordo and Natanz, are buried underground. Although the Air Force\u2019s B-2 pilots aimed their munitions at ventilation shafts and officials boasted of a clean hit, the extent of destruction is impossible to know from satellite imagery; international observers have also been unable to access the site. Not even the Iranians may know for sure how much, if anything, remains.<\/p>\n
The relative dearth of information offers a sharp contrast to the war in Iraq, where the U.S. occupation that followed the 2003 invasion provided the U.S. military with an opportunity for an up-close study of its own weaponeering. After the initial wave of bombing, American troops\u2019 ability to travel freely across Iraq allowed them to conduct inspections of the effects of explosives dropped from the sky. In some cases, U.S. troops climbed into the wreckage of bombed buildings and discovered that the destruction inflicted by U.S. munitions had fallen far short of what military calculations had predicted.<\/p>\n
One former senior military official told us that the lessons in \u201cweapons effects\u201d drawn from that conflict also informed the development of newer, more potent bombs. That includes the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or GBU-57, which is the 30,000-pound \u201cbunker-busting\u201d bomb developed specifically for Iran\u2019s underground nuclear sites. \u201cThe thing was built for that target,\u201d the former official said. Fourteen of them were dropped over the weekend.<\/p>\n
But without American personnel on the ground, and with the possibility that international inspectors will never reach the damaged sites, the Trump administration must rely on a combination of satellite imagery, intercepted Iranian communications, and human intelligence to assess the impact. Although Israel has demonstrated a remarkable penetration of Iran\u2019s scientific and military establishment over the past year, even it may not know the location and condition of Iran\u2019s enriched-uranium supply or the condition of its centrifuges and weapons-making components. No one knows, either, whether Iran, as it suggested earlier this month, can fall back on a third enrichment site it purports to have created, in addition to the damaged facilities at Fordo and Natanz.<\/p>\n
After 10 days of Israeli strikes on Iran\u2019s air- and missile-defense sites and other security installations, the country\u2019s conventional military capability has been seriously weakened. But as Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard Kennedy School, noted to us, the long-term impact on the nuclear program is likely smaller. Meanwhile, any hope of a negotiated solution in which Iran agrees to give up enrichment is likely diminished.<\/p>\n
Iran has long been divided between hard-liners who place high value on attaining a bomb and others who favor negotiations, sanctions relief, and global reintegration. Now the political power of the latter faction \u201chas been destroyed by these strikes,\u201d Bunn said. \u201cThere\u2019s quite a number of people who are saying, Damn, we really need that nuclear weapon now<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By his own account, the military operation that Donald Trump mounted against Iran over the weekend was an unqualified success. Saturday\u2019s covert raid, in which U.S. bombers dropped a series of massive, tailor-made bombs onto fortified Iranian sites, left Tehran\u2019s nuclear capability \u201ccompletely and totally obliterated,\u201d the president proclaimed in a triumphant White House address<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9565,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[265,84,1349,1933,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-9564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-impact","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-strike","11":"tag-true","12":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}