Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Damage Control

President Trump’s childish and out-of-touch message following US strikes on Iran is now, properly, a matter of contention. He said:

“Iran has officially responded to our Obliteration of their Nuclear Facilities with a very weak response, which we expected, and have very effectively countered. . . . Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE. Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region . . .”

Leaving aside the absurd notion that bombing a country can produce peace and harmony, the finding of “Obliteration” is clearly wrong.

Following Trump’s comment, other less grand assessments of the US strikes have been offered, ranging from “enormous damage” and “severe damage” to the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini’s insistence that “nothing at all” was seriously damaged. Accompanying these assessments of what bombing accomplished are wide-ranging predictions of how badly Iran’s nuclear program has been set back: a few months, several months, several years. All these assessments and predictions obscure a simple fact: Iran still has the human and technical resources to produce a nuclear weapon at some point in the future, and now with greater incentive than ever to do so.

Several expert accounts note that the air strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the three Iranian nuclear facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s report, which cites a........

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