The Duke of Wellington, assessing newly arrived British soldiers during the Peninsular War, is supposed to have said, ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.’ Having watched Donald Trump greet Vladimir Putin with a red carpet in Alaska a week ago, then direct his secretary of defense Pete Hegseth to sack another general and two admirals, I’m not certain that the US President even knows who the enemy in this case is.

Leading the most recent casualties was Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, an experienced intelligence officer serving as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His mortal sin was obvious: his organisation’s initial assessment in June, which leaked to the media, was that Operation Midnight Hammer – the air strikes that same month on nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan by B-2 stealth bombers – had only set back Iran’s pursuit of an atomic bomb by a matter of months. It did not seem to have destroyed the country’s enriched uranium stockpile.

What Trump and Hegseth are doing is blood-letting, and, like all blood-letting, it will cause weakness

This was unacceptable because Trump had already presented alternative facts. He had told the American people that ‘Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated’ and that the chances of Tehran becoming a nuclear power had ‘gone for years’. Flushed with imaginary success, he also compared it to the........

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