NBC News, citing five current and former U.S. officials, reported yesterday that the latest U.S. military assessment of the June 21 U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites resulted in substantial damage to only one of them. Fordow was supposedly mostly destroyed but the two others were not as badly damaged and may have been degraded only to a point where nuclear enrichment could resume in the next several months if Iran wants it to.
Two of the sources claimed that there have been discussions within both the American and Israeli governments about whether additional strikes on the two less-damaged facilities could be necessary if Iran does not soon agree to restart negotiations with the Trump administration on a nuclear deal or if there are signs Iran is trying to rebuild at those locations, one of the current officials and one of the former officials said.
NBC News also reported that the U.S. Central Command had developed a much more comprehensive plan to strike Iran that would have involved hitting three additional sites in an operation that would have stretched for several weeks instead of a single night, according to a current U.S. official and two former U.S. officials.
President Donald Trump was briefed on that plan, but it was rejected because it was at odds with his foreign policy instincts to extract the United States from conflicts abroad, not dig deeper into them, as well as the possibility of a high number of casualties on both sides, one of the current officials and one of the former officials said. “We were willing to go all the way in our options, but the president did not want to,” one of the sources with knowledge of the plan said.
Not surprisingly, both the White House and the Pentagon rejected the NBC News report insisting that the three sites were totally obliterated and the reports to the contrary are fake news. The battle between the corporate news media and the Trump Administration, however, isn’t over the truth of the matter at hand, but over whether or not the U.S. will launch more attacks on Iran, furthering ensnaring Trump in the British war trap.
