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A half-dozen B-2 bombers dropped at least a dozen Massive Ordinance Penetrators on Iran’s nuclear weapons faculty at Fordow, but since the mountain didn’t explode like the Death Star in Star Wars, the mission was deemed a disappointment by some in legacy media and many online keyboard warriors.
“Minimal damage causing a month or two delay”: That’s a summary, composite “take” of TDS-afflicted journalists and their sources who appear to suffer from JCPOA separation anxiety disorder.
The idea that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was set back for only a matter of months—as opposed to the “several years” that Israeli intelligence has concluded—is not a serious assessment but yet another “product” of a hyper-politicized “intelligence community.” (Recall that 51 of the “IC”’s best and brightest retired “leadership” told the legacy media and via them the entire country in 2020 that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”)
Israeli journalist Amit Segal, armed with the first layer of Israeli IC assessments that concluded “that US and Israeli strikes set back Iran’s nuclear program by ‘several years,’ but did not completely destroy it…” added the next day: “Don’t forget: It wasn’t just scientists who Israel eliminated. Indeed, I can now reveal the scale of Israel’s opening strike against Iran: Israel eliminated 29 Iranian officers with the rank of brigadier general and higher.”
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“They don’t have the scientists, and they don’t have the centrifuges, and they don’t have the infrastructure,” Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and current senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon.
“Even if it hasn’t been destroyed,” Conricus added, “it is out of reach, most likely buried under hundreds of feet of rock and concrete. At the end of the day, the Iranian ability to develop nuclear weapons sustained quite extremely heavy blows.”
TRUMP SAYS US WOULD STRIKE AGAIN IF IRAN REBUILDS NUCLEAR PROGRAM
I asked the last National Security Advisor to President Trump in Trump’s first term, Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien, now chairman of American Global Strategies, for his overall take.
“The air raid on Iran’s nuclear bomb factories was the essence of an ‘America First’ foreign policy,” O’Brien emailed me.
“The Ayatollahs have been kidnapping, maiming and killing Americans in Beirut, at Kobar Towers, in Iraq and Afghanistan for forty years,” O’Brien continued. “The regime’s supporter chant ‘death to America in their mosques each Friday. Letting these radicals get an atomic bomb and the ballistic missiles to deliver it to our homeland would be a monumental mistake and would have put the American people at risk.”
“Donald Trump said ‘no.’” O’Brien concluded. “And, he meant it. The Iranians thought they were dealing with Obama or Biden. They found out last night what happens when you string President Trump along.”
The widespread destruction of regime assets by the Israeli airforce before the American strikes occurred had already humbled the regime of Ayatollah Khamenei. When the mullahs sent up a fireworks display over Qatar is was their penultimate gesture of resignation to defeat and harmless. Their final attack did kill four Israeli civilians and underscored the regime’s lawlessness as the missile was aimed at civilians to kill civilians.
Still so deep does hatred for President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu run that their critics have already assumed the attitude of the Black Knight is the old “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” movie, shouting “it’s only a scratch.”
I’m going to believe Israeli intelligence and the political leadership of both countries. Not only did the Israelis use some sort of version of the weapon Woody Harrleson wielded as Yondu Udonta in Guardians of the Galaxy —a Yaka Arrow” — it did so armed with Intel on where everyone was sleeping or gathering. The precision nature of every Israeli blow should lead anyone unburdened by deep, deep confirmation bias needs (say, everyone who worked on the “JCPOA”) to conclude the nuclear ambitions of Iran are in a smoldering heap, like their “doomsday clock for Israel” and the gates of Evin Prison. Trust the Israeli IC. They appear to have free run of everything the Iranian regime says and does.
What Trump ordered done was a history-altering event as well as a war-ending blow. Again, Iran cannot be expected to concede its humiliation. But its leaders must now know they are no longer feared in the Middle East as a dominant power, and that if even token gestures are taken by it to hurt Americans or Israelis, or to resume forbidden nuclear weapons development, retribution will be swift. President Trump is sending the same message again and again: “Don’t harm one American. Don’t even think about restarting the nuke program.” Every leader in the world got the same message as did the mullahs: Trump and the prudent use of American military force are back.
Finally, Americans should have learned, again, that they cannot trust the “fake news” of much of legacy media. The underlying disorders of these former “newsrooms” are too deep to treat. They are as broken as Natanz nuclear weapons complex.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekdays from 3 pm to 6 pm ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives America home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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