As he is accustomed to doing, President Donald Trump may be exaggerating the success of America’s surprise attack over the weekend on three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities.
Within hours of the unleashing of bunker-busting bombs and cruise missiles, the president declared that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” the facilities. In reality, it may take a while to learn how much damage the U.S. strike did to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and that rogue nation’s thinly veiled desire to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Just as Trump is going to play up the damage, Iran is going to try to minimize it, with some Iranian officials already claiming that the country, anticipating the attack, had removed nuclear material from targeted sites ahead of time.
One independent source, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has indicated, however, that Trump’s assessment is probably closer to the truth than Iran’s.
In the meantime, what can’t be disputed is that the U.S. attack was extremely well executed, catching most everyone outside of a small inner circle within the administration by surprise.
The stealth aircraft carrying the 30,000-pound bombs were launched from the middle of the U.S., 18 hours away from their targets. Decoy aircraft were sent first in a westerly direction, so as to throw off any spotters from noticing the real bomb-carrying planes, which took an easterly route. Trump himself was a key player in the subterfuge, announcing on Thursday that he would decide within two weeks whether to authorize the attack and then going about his presidential routine as normal.
The assumption was that Trump was probably bluffing, using his trademark deal-making approach of threatening drastic action, only to later back off. Besides, to attack Iran would go against Trump’s past political stands, in which he criticized former presidents for getting into protracted wars in the Middle East, with little success to show for the expenditure of U.S. blood and money.
This time, though, the president went against his own tendencies, a brave but risky decision that has a definite upside but also plenty of potential downsides.
The upside, of course, is keeping Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal. If America’s apparent collaboration with Israel has set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the point where it might be willing to give them up in exchange for economic concessions, the world will rest much better. Given Iran’s stated desire to annihilate Israel and the terrorism Iran supports through proxies across the Middle East, it would be foolhardy to underestimate the global danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.
U.S. military action against Iran carries its own risk, however. It’s one that neither Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden nor even Trump in his first term was willing to take. Now that the U.S. has attacked such an unpredictable adversary, there’s no telling how far the hostilities might escalate.
Iran’s initial response was launching a missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar, a seemingly face-saving gesture that, according to initial reports Monday, produced no casualties.
But that may not be the end of it. Israel continues to strike sites in Iran, and now the U.S. is as likely a target for retaliation as is Israel.
Trump was faced with a terribly difficult decision. Should he continue to trust in sanctions and diplomacy that have slowed Iran’s nuclear ambitions but not stopped them? Or should he employ awesome U.S. military technology to try to immediately remove the threat and push a weakened Iran to the negotiating table?
The president opted to gamble on the latter. Events in the coming days and weeks will determine whether it was the right choice. Let’s hope it was.
