On Thursday, President Trump gave Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime he has led for more than 35 years an ultimatum: start negotiating over your nuclear programme, or face the full consequences. He would allow another two weeks, at most, for Tehran to prove its willingness to negotiate sincerely.
The armchair warriors on cable TV news are gloating about how great the operation turned and how resolute Trump proved to be, but none appear particularly interested in the first, second and third order effects of the decision.
The two weeks, however, was only two days. Trump’s decision to drop 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Iran’s deeply-buried underground uranium enrichment facility, as well as on facilities at Natanz and Isfahan, was the culmination of eight days of deliberations within the Trump administration. It was a long eight days for Trump, no doubt, with Senator Lindsey Graham on one side urging him to take care of Iran’s nuclear programme militarily; former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was on the other, counselling the president to stick with his ‘America First’ principles of non-interventionism.
Ultimately, Trump split the baby—or at least tried to. The way the White House describes it, Trump is taking decisive military action on Iran without getting bogged down in another long, drawn-out, convoluted mess in the Middle East. There will be no regime change as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants, nor will there be U.S. boots on Iranian soil. Trump shared these details with Fox host Sean Hannity, and added that all of the Iranian nuclear sites targeted were completely destroyed.
But let’s face it: America’s capabilities were never in dispute. The question wasn’t whether the United States could bomb buildings both above and below ground, but whether bombing was the right way to address the Iranian nuclear issue. The armchair warriors on cable TV news are gloating about how great the operation turned and how resolute Trump proved to be, but none appear particularly interested in the first, second and third order effects of the decision. And there are plenty to mention.
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