Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear program, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.”

Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer – that quick and spectacular bombing mission on three Iranian nuclear sites on June 22 – the White House and the Department of Defense (or War) went to great lengths to cover up a leaked Pentagon analysis which suggested the attack had not, in fact, destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. 

That was a low-level initial assessment, said Hegseth, as he made out that........

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