U.S. strike on Iran: It won’t be surgical, and it won’t be easy

Satellite image of Fordo nuclear facility in Iran: Maxar Technologies

Donald Trump held another top-secret meeting with his so-called national security “team” in the Situation Room to discuss “the war between Israel and Iran,” a White House source told Axios today.

That’s a lie. They weren’t talking about the war between Israel and Iran. They’ve talked that to death. All Trump wanted to know from the likes of Secretary of Defense Pete “Keep That Bottle Away from Me” Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe was whether dropping a bunker buster bomb on Iran’s nuclear facility at Fordo will be successful and when he can start bragging about it.

There is a word that isn’t used enough to describe Donald Trump: Impatient. He is probably the most impatient president in U.S. history. He wants things to happen not tomorrow, but yesterday, and he wants it over before he plays his next round of golf at Bedminster.

Hegseth and the rest of them have been down in the Situation Room with a gigantic flat-screen showing Trump how it will work. See, the bombers take off from here…pointing to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean where the U.S. maintains a base and has a stash of B-2 bombers…they fly in this direction…they are refueled here…and they go boom-boom here.

Trump doesn’t want to read reports with facts and figures. He likes to see it, and he wants it guaranteed. He doesn’t care about the details. He wants the visual. He’ll demand that the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) be fitted with a camera so that after the attack, televisions in the United States will be able to show the bomb falling toward its target, followed by the distinctive white out of the strike.

He will demand that another jet film the aftermath of the series of strikes it will take to knock out the Iranian enrichment facility and manufacturing plant. He wants to be able to stand out on the links at Bedminster or on the south lawn of the White House and confidently tell a gaggle of eager reporters that he acted decisively, and now Iran does not have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon…something that Joe Biden and Barack Obama and the rest of them were not able to guarantee, but he can.

There is only one problem: There are no guarantees when it comes to waging a war, which is exactly what we will be doing if we attack Iran and attempt to knock out its nuclear program. There are only “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” in the memorable words of Donald Rumsfeld, describing the evidence, or lack thereof, the U.S. had about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and its contacts with terrorist groups.

Trump faces a list of problems as long as the fairway off the first tee at Bedminster. The intelligence he is relying on comes almost exclusively from Israel, which has agents and intelligence gathering materiel on the ground inside Iran. Israel, to put it bluntly, is not a disinterested party in this and has been leaning on every American administration to become involved in taking out Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump has other sources of intelligence – the CIA and NSA and satellite intelligence, for example – but the thing about intelligence is that it’s all very specific right up to the point that it’s not, and thus becomes speculative, part of the unknown unknows Rumsfeld, for all of his bluster, was at least willing to admit.

For example, the nuclear facility is deep within a mountain south of Tehran. The New York Times quoted Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, describing the Fordo facility: “I’ve been there, it’s half a mile underground.”

Yep, it probably is…the last time Mr. Grossi looked, when Iran accompanied him and other inspectors who visited the site. But did they show him the new tunnel they’ve been working on for the last two or three years, the one leading to a new area of the facility they’ve built knowing that the original one, the one they showed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is the one that will be hit when the day comes that some American president…uh, say, Donald Trump…is stupid enough to put his okay on a plan to bomb Fordo?

There are the little workshops and labs hidden all over Iran where new centrifuges are being put together and research is being done and all the other gimcrackery that goes into a nuclear weapon is being built, far from the obvious targets of Fordo and Natanz, Iran’s other enrichment facility.

Does Trump and his team of “experts” really believe that Iran has put all its dreams of nuclear weapons capability in one convenient basket that every satellite in the sky can see from space and put crosshairs on? That’s actually a good question, because Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a field day firing experts in every government department they could find, including in the Pentagon and the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They already fired Air Force General Timothy Haugh, who also leads US Cyber Command, and his deputy, Wendy Noble. Haugh and Noble had to go because Laura Loomer waltzed into the Oval Office and told Trump that the two NSA officials had been “hand-picked” by Trump’s nemesis, General Mark Milley…plus DEI, and Noble is a woman who was probably appointed over a more qualified man because of her gender, I’m sure Loomer said.

So there went two experts who could have attended the big meetings in the Situation Room yesterday and today, and who the hell knows how many other experts on Iran and nuclear weapons were sacrificed to budget cuts and DEI purges and everything else that has been wreaked upon key federal agencies since January 20. Hegseth, along with taking down the photographs of previous Secretaries of Defense he and Trump don’t like, has done his own purging of the Pentagon, and because the staffing inside that building is top-secret, we have no way of knowing how much talent went down the drain for spurious reasons like DEI and suspected disloyalty to Trump and the Republican cause.

What is known about what a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facility might look like? Well, the Air Force will likely demand that they be able to do a couple of nights of “softening up” of the Iranian defenses around Fordo and wherever else the attack will hit. That means jets off carriers flying into Iranian air space to take out any remaining air defenses the Israelis might have missed, or that the Iranians replaced since the last Israeli strikes.

See, that’s the thing. In a war, and that’s what is going on in Iran right now, the bad guy doesn’t just take a hit and give up its ability to defend himself. Iran doubtlessly has multiple layers of air defenses it can deploy for just this possibility, that the U.S. would send B-2’s to knock out Fordo. Iran hides air defenses, they dig them into tunnels, they bury them in bunkers, they conceal them in civilian neighborhoods, and after Israel makes one of its strikes, they haul out their back-up defenses and set them up and get ready for what they clearly see as the Big One: the U.S. coming after Fordo and Natanz.

Then there is the issue of retaliation. Let’s say Trump orders the attack on Fordo, and we have a couple of days of celebratory videos showing explosions and those nose-camera shots from bombs falling towards targets. Do you think that Iran will just sit back and lick its wounds and ask for a new round of negotiations? The Ayatollah has already said that Iran does not negotiate under duress, and moreover, he has said that there will be no UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, the absurd demand from you-know-who.

Iran has a massive stockpile of medium range ballistic missiles that are said to be very accurate and can hit American targets in the Persian Gulf states as well as Iraq and anything we’ve got in Turkey, which is a NATO ally, after all, and likely to house various U.S. military outposts.

You know as well as I do what that means. Iranian missiles will kill Americans. Some of them will be military, but some will be civilians, so Trump won’t be able to take that sitting down. He’ll have to re-retaliate with new strikes on Iran to knock out their missiles and their ability to mine the Strait of Hormuz and attack international shipping. And how do we expect the Houthis to respond, especially if Trump’s threat to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader isn’t hollow, and he gives that order? The Red Sea will return to being a shooting gallery, and let’s not even get into what’s going to happen to oil prices and gas prices at the pump back here in the good ole U.S.A. Then there is the issue of Iran ordering its sleeper cells of terrorists, which are said to be pre-positioned around the world, to start hitting American civilians on the streets of London and Paris and who knows? New York and Washington D.C. aren’t out of the question as targets for Iranian terror.

You see how quickly this whole “let’s knock out Iran’s nukes” thing devolves into an all-out war?

The truly frightening thing for me is the image I’ve got stuck in my head of Trump and his gaggle of national security officials in the White House Situation Room with a clown like Hegseth standing at the end of a big table pointing at a big flat-screen showing boom-booms and IA generated images of Iran’s uranium centrifuges all exploded into pieces of bent and charred aluminum and steel and his fake confidence and Christian Nationalist fervor making the whole thing look like it’s not only a walk in the park, but blessed from On High.

We have watched Donald Trump and the Musk-minions as they have wreaked havoc throughout our government for the last three or four months, and folks, now we are about to see the national security price we will pay for all that cost-cutting and DEI firing and “transgender for all” fear mongering. It’s one thing to pick up the paper and read lists of programs that have been shut down and see totals of tens and hundreds of millions that have been thrown in the shredder. But now Donald Trump is going to make a decision that will put American military men and women in airplanes flying over a hostile nation that has the ability to shoot them out of the sky, and the fact is, Trump and his MAGA base are not prepared for what that means and what will happen next.

He's not just mulling over an attack on Iran’s nuclear facility with some big bombs dropped from high altitude stealth bombers. He’s getting ready to start a war.