The aftermath of the Israel-Iran War has entered a dangerous phase.
Both certain top Israeli and top American officials seem less concerned with ensuring all aspects of Iran’s nuclear program have been or will be destroyed and accounted for than they do with either taking a victory lap or trying to tear down the victory lap.
On the one hand, White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded late on Tuesday to a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) estimate that said that US and Israeli attacks only set Iran back a few months, saying, “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community…Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Let’s put aside the ethics of when intelligence community members choose to leak documents to the public that they may believe their political overseers are trying to suppress (the leak came around when an intelligence briefing to Congress was canceled.)
Also, let’s put aside Ms. Leavitt’s name-calling against potentially highly placed and trained intelligence officials because they put out information inconsistent with US President Donald Trump’s political messaging. The bizarre and critical statement here is her assertion that “we all know what happens” when enough large bombs are dropped on their target as planned: “total obliteration.”
Actually, no one has any idea what happens. It has never been done before.
No one has ever dropped the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) 30,000 bomb on a mountain with the hope of penetrating dozens of meters underground to destroy thousands of nuclear centrifuges. The science suggests that one of these bombs, and certainly the several that were dropped, should be enough to destroy the Fordow nuclear site completely. But no one actually knows.
And yet it has been crucial for Trump to say not only that he heavily damaged the Iranian nuclear program, as non-political IDF officials and even IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi have said – but that it was “obliterated” because that makes a better political soundbite.
This statement makes nuance difficult and could even lead his administration to suppress and not properly go after leads for pieces of the program that might have survived the strikes, lest Trump be exposed as only having caused heavy damage.
On the other hand of the spectrum are those political actors and media who seek to tear down anything positive that Trump or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might manage.
The DIA report should be taken seriously, whether it is a minority opinion or not. But the DIA is one of 17 US intelligence agencies, and some of them, like the CIA, may not agree with the DIA.
Further, the apolitical IDF intelligence unit and the far-from-pro-Israel or pro-US IAEA both seem to think that the attacks on Iran set the nuclear program back a lot more than a few months, maybe even a few years.
Critics of Trump and Netanyahu are not jumping for joy only at the DIA report but also at reports that some Iranian enriched uranium could have been moved from Fordow and other sites before Israel attacked.
The evidence is commercial satellite footage of a large line of trucks coming to and from Fordow.
The evidence is commercial satellite footage of a large line of trucks coming to and from Fordow.
So Israel just managed to kill nine out of the 13 Iranian military chiefs and over a dozen nuclear scientists and destroy dozens of nuclear sites (not only the big three, which the media mostly focuses on) and two-thirds of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers, with hundreds of its agents penetrating all over Iran’s most hallowed halls at will – and people think it missed a long line of trucks going in and out of one of the most watched facilities?
The truth is that no one knows exactly how damaged Fordow is.
But if Iran does not show the world videos in the coming days or weeks of its centrifuges in good and operating condition, that will say it all.
And when Israel said that it attacked access routes to Fordow, is there much doubt that it might have been sending in crews to check the damage (something Trump seemed to confirm on Wednesday)?
So Iran’s nuclear program has likely been heavily damaged across the board and set back a year or two or more. And probably some aspects of the program were not “obliterated” and still exist to be reused or reintegrated into rebuilding the program.
Instead of fighting about how destroyed or obliterated one nuclear site or another was or whether holes can be poked into Trump or Netanyahu’s political narratives, the focus should be on giving Israeli and US intelligence agencies all the resources and support they need to find out the nuanced truth: what survived and how to track it so that it can be destroyed as well if Iran does not agree to a new nuclear deal and tries to reconstitute its nuclear threat.