after the US attack
Well, Trump did it.
I've been expecting it ever since he said that "we" had achieved air superiority over Iran. His excitement over Israel's swaggering aerial victory overcame his hesitation at getting involved in a war with no clear end point; everbody was crowing about Israeli success, and he wanted to be part of that thrill ride.
Based on the images we are seeing today, the attack on the underground nuclear facility of Fordow may have been "successful," in the sense of badly damaging that facility.
Yay, B-2. Yay "Massive Ordnance Penetrator." Go team.
But to what end?
If the goal is Iranian surrender, I doubt it. I suspect the regime will let us bomb until we run out of bombs before they give up their sovereignty. Satellites have recorded long columns of trucks at Fordow recently, so many of the centrifuges and much of the highly enriched Uranium may already have been moved. Come to think of it, that may be why Trump attacked now.
Meanwhile, the former president of Russia says that "a number of countries" are now ready to supply Iran with warheads. Did anybody consider that if US and Israeli behavior got too outrageous, somebody might just sell Iran a bomb?
If Iran just does nothing, how long will we keep this up? I mean, Hezbollah never surrendered. Israel certainly won a victory of sorts over them, but the government of Iran is not just going to fade into the mountains.
Will we ever again have a US president who won't give in to the calls to "do something" and the pressure to bomb?
By coincidence, this is the 84th anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia. That campaign certainly started out as a rousing success, but it did not end well for the attackers. Not that Iran is ever going to take Washington, but wars have a way of not going according to plan.
Update 1, 6/22/2025
Farzan Sabet (IranWonk on Twitter/X) has this, from a post in Farsi: "If you don't want to go nuclear right now and unveil the arsenal, end this nauseating show, sign a humiliating peace, and be done with it." Sabet says this is a common sentiment in Iran, that the regime should either build a bomb now or definitively give up and normalize relations with the world.
Update 2, 6/22/2025
Gregg Carlstrom on Twitter/X:
In between "symbolic retaliation followed by serious diplomacy" and "wider regional war" there are other murky scenarios: no big escalation but also no deal, a regime more intent on a bomb than ever. The consequences of Trump's strike are far from clear.
2 comments:
Yay, B-2. Yay "Massive Ordnance Penetrator." Go team.
But to what end?
To two ends:
1) Feeding Trump's ego.
2) Pleasing his base with a hollow claim of "victory".
Literally nothing else matters. Trump genuinely does not care. Facts don't concern him - only his feelings, and the feelings of his supporters. He wants to feel and appear "tough". And so he's playing pretend that he's a "big" "strong" "leader", and relishing the praise and admiration of his flunkies.
Trump has zero qualms about making the world a worse place in the long run in exchange for a momentary bolstering of his pathetic ego.
What will be interesting going forward is how other nations deal with a very powerful state whose word can't be trusted and who uses deception as a means of gaining advantage.
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