On one hand, you have the White House, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, insisting and insisting again — insisting too much, methinks — that those B–2 bombers that flew over Iran two Sundays back, June 22, obliterated the nation’s nuclear program just as President Trump hastily claimed as soon as the operation was completed.
Hegseth at a news conference with Caine four days later: “U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program …. You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated, choose your word. This was an historically successful attack, and we should celebrate it as Americans.”
Leviathan and Its Enemies
Best Price: $31.45
Buy New $28.13
(as of 12:27 UTC – Details)
Trump, at a news conference the next day: “The place was bombed to hell …. The last thing they’re thinking about now is nuclear weapons.”
And in the background you have the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency performing Difficulty 5 back flips as they repudiate initial assessments of limited damage to the Iranian nuclear program so as to conform to the Trump regime’s “obliterated, destroyed, defeated” narrative.
On the other hand, you have reports that the Iranians, warned in advance the “bunker busters” would fall on the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites, removed their 400–kilograms of enriched uranium, not quite 900 pounds, to secret locations. Immediately after the bombs fell, Amwaj.media, a British-based digital publication that covers West Asia in English, Arabic and Farsi, reported this, citing “a high-ranking Iranian political source [who] also confirmed that the targeted sites were evacuated, with ‘most’ of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium kept in secure locations.”
“How can you tell,” Reuters asked in a June 29 report, “if enriched uranium stocks, some of them near weapons grade, were buried beneath the rubble or secretly hidden away?”
You cannot, it seems to me. Neither can President Trump or any of his adjutants.
Then you have the granular analysis of reputable technologists such as Ted Postol, the gentlemanly scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has over many years exploded more false flags, propaganda ops, and other such ruses than you’ve had hot dinners.
There is satellite imagery showing 16 tractor trailers lined up at Fordow in the days before the B–2s flew. Trump insists they were pouring concrete, a peculiar use of a truck of that sort, I have to say. It is magnitudes more plausible they were there to load the steel drums in which enriched uranium is commonly stored and shipped.
Postol gave the heavy-on-the-science interview to Daniel Davis, an Army veteran who now podcasts as a respected military analyst, after the Hegseth–Caine press conference. In the course of it, the joint chiefs chairman went full monty with slides, diagrams, satellite images, and graphics to show (or is snow my word?) the assembled reporters just how true the obliterated-destroyed-defeated story is.
“What it clearly shows is that the bottom of the shaft [formed by the bombs] is still sealed,” Postol said of Caine’s presentation. “Caine is probably a good soldier, but he doesn’t know much science. You cannot succeed with this kind of attack. It was destined to fail.”
Postol also proves astute as to the political dynamics of the administration’s shape-shifting accounts of the Iranian mission: “This is a circus, a political circus to try to minimize the embarrassment to President Trump for having spoken without any knowledge.”
Where are we, then? As Postol points out during his exchange with Davis, “You can’t trust the media and you can’t trust the intelligence community.” What happened and what is going to happen next? These are the questions we are left to consider more or less on our own.
Strange as it may seem, I find it easier to anticipate the future than to conclude with certainty what it is that those B–2s and their 30,000–pound bombs actually got done.
It may be that we are doomed never to know the extent of the damage the Air Force’s aerial operation caused. But, staying short of convictions as we must, I put my stock in those reports that the Iranians had advance notice that the B–2s were coming. I have heard no official denial on this point. And so much of contemporary warfare is weirdly choreographed, after all. In this case, telling Tehran the battle plan would serve to reduce the danger — danger the International Atomic Energy Agency warned of prior to the operation — of a catastrophic release of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
And there is the science, such as unscientific minds, mine among them, can understand it. I have found Ted Postol a careful, persuasive witness ever since he discredited those false-flag chemical weapons incidents in Syria at the height of the Western-run operation to bring down the Assad regime. Take a look at the video of his talk with Daniel Davis. He did the same thing this time: Here are the physics, here the thermodynamics, this is what would have to have happened if the obliteration story was true, and here is how we know it did not happen.
As to what is likely to come next, we can usefully read events as mirrors of intentions.
I think it is true that Hegseth, Caine and others among Trump’s sycophantic appointees are protecting the president from ignominy — or more ignominy, better to say — as they flood the zone with pseudoscience and, in Hegseth’s case, shrill exhortations to print and broadcast media to stop with the reporting and get with the patriotic propaganda. (Read the transcript linked above for the full taste of these crude harangues.)
But there is more to President Trump than his obvious concern for appearances. In my view he is very eager to avoid any circumstance that would require another American air campaign in Iranian airspace. He wants neither the risk nor the responsibility. This is how, paradoxically, I read his warning the other day that he will bomb again if Iran resumes its enrichment processes. When Trump drops threats like granite boulders we can read in them what he actually wants. In this case it is another way of saying, “Please stay with the ceasefire and short of the nuclear stuff.”
With Trump, it is as it was with Joe Biden and numerous of their predecessors. One can never tell the extent to which Trump, is willing to restrain the Israelis as they advance their aggressions — which any American regime could do in very short order — and the extent to which he pretends to be willing to restrain the Israelis but has no intention of doing so because of the Israel lobbies.
A Theory of Socialism …
Best Price: $1.99
Buy New $10.70
(as of 07:55 UTC – Details)
The New York Times ran a report Monday, June 29, under the headline, “Israel’s Military Appears Poised to Expand Into Gaza City Amid Cease-Fire Calls.” While Trump and his national-security people press for a ceasefire in Gaza — with what degree of vigor we do not know — the Zionist state just ordered Palestinians to evacuate the Strip’s main city after not operating here for many months. So they seem to be going in yet again. “There has been no advancement in the ceasefire talks,” The Times, quoting two Israeli officials and another unnamed source, reported.
This development has nothing and everything to do with Israel’s current posture toward Iran, as I interpret it. Israel has as little intention of ceasing its operations against Iran, now that they are finally underway, as it does to end its genocidal ethnic-cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza. These aggressions are both fronts in what the Israelis call their “seven-front war” across West Asia, and we must not lose sight of this. We witness a thematically unified campaign of terror. There is no place in it for ceasefires, peaceful coexistence or anything else short of total victory.
As in Gaza, so in the West Bank, and as in Gaza and the West Bank, so in Lebanon, and as in these three, so in Iran. I see no chance whatsoever that the Israelis consider themselves done with the Islamic Republic. Destroying the nation’s nuclear program, wrecking the economy and essential infrastructure, creating a state of political chaos, assassinating or otherwise decapitating the leadership: All this appears to be under discussion among Israel’s war planners.
It is merely a matter of time before the Zionist state resumes its aggressions. Then there will be more questions, chief among them what the United States and the rest of the West will do as more barbarities unfold before the world’s eyes.
This article was originally published on ScheerPost.
