Hello. I had some quiet time Thursday evening—the teens were teening and my husband had met up with some work friends—so I thought I’d get a head start on this newsletter. We had published some good analysis of President Donald Trump’s deployment of not just the National Guard but also 700 Marines to the Los Angeles area to quell protests against immigration raids. Surely that would be the biggest story of the week, right?
Wrong. As I learned immediately upon opening my laptop a little after 8 p.m., Israel had just launched an attack on Iran. The strikes took out Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Gen. Hossein Salami, Iranian military chief Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, and a number of nuclear scientists. It also revealed the degree to which Israel had infiltrated the Islamic state. Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad had established a secret drone base inside Iran, and used it to launch UAVs to take out Iran’s air defenses.
Israel and Iran have been trading strikes ever since. Iranian missiles struck Rishon LeZion and Tel Aviv the following night, killing three people. Israel claims it has significantly damaged Iranian nuclear sites, though reports conflict on the extent of the damage.
Taking out Iran’s nuclear program is a primary goal of Operation Rising Lion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech announcing the strikes on Iran, calling the program“a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”
The Trump administration has been in talks with Iran to establish an agreement preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons, and Trump had reportedly told Netanyahu not to strike Iran while they were ongoing. A sixth round of talks had been scheduled for Sunday in Oman—it’s uncertain but appears unlikely those talks will take place. Given that these talks were scheduled even as rumors that an Israeli attack was imminent has prompted questions as to whether the U.S. was involved in the operation. As Nick Catoggio noted Friday in Boiling Frogs, “The negotiations ‘ended up being the perfect cover for a surprise Israeli attack,’ lulling the Iranians into lowering their guard in the mistaken belief that nothing would happen until after Sunday’s talks at the earliest, the Wall Street Journal alleged.”
The initial response from the administration was muted, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating Thursday night, “We are not involved in strikes against Iran and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense.”
But on Friday, Trump himself told CNN’s Dana Bash, “We of course support Israel, obviously and supported it like nobody has ever supported it.”
So were the scheduled talks a “hoax” to fool Iran or was Israel acting against Trump’s wishes? Nick is not sure we’ll ever know.
If you were Netanyahu, having just flagrantly defied your American patron and blown up his dream of detente with Tehran (literally!), what would you say the next day? Would you dare embarrass the president by informing the world that he opposed the strikes, calling his nerve, his judgment, and his influence over his closest allies into question?
Or would you graciously include him in your victory lap following a spectacular military achievement by spreading a lie that he was in on it from the start?
In the Friday G-File, Jonah Goldberg had a slightly more generous take.
If it is even partially true that the Trump administration deliberately helped distract Iran from thinking there was an imminent attack, never mind if it helped Israel pull this off, it deserves a good deal of credit and praise. And, if you’re on Team Iran, or are anti-Israel for one reason or another—or simply think maintaining the Obama-Biden and Biden-Harris Middle East policies of talking in fancy hotel conference rooms over plates of runny cheese while Iran develops a nuclear weapon and funds proxies bent on destroying Israel is the way to go—then the Trump administration deserves a good deal of blame and criticism. But that’s not where I am.
There will be, as I say so often in this space, more to come on this next week. In the meantime, don’t miss our coverage of the events in Los Angeles. Nick argued that Trump was seeking to desensitize Americans to the idea of using the military domestically, Jonah lamented that, “Since the days of his ‘American carnage,’ talk, Trump has been trying to turn our country into a war for his own purposes,” and Michael Warren noted that while polling indicates that Americans support Trump’s efforts on immigration, they don’t like the way he’s handling deportations. Also, Sarah Isgur and David French discussed the legal issues with the deployments on Advisory Opinions.
In the meantime, thank you for reading and have a great weekend. And Happy Father’s Day to all the awesome dads out there.
