In context below, here is the statement made by Pete Hegseth in his Pentagon press conference:
Let me read the bottom line here. President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history and it was a resounding success resulting in a cease fire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.
I have no doubt that Hegseth knows about D-Day and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but does he know what that planning for the first was called Operation Overlord and the second was called The Manhattan Project? I have my doubts.
Trump and Hegseth are desperate to brag about the success of the Iran bombing. Alas, for them, they don’t have compelling photographic evidence like those on the top of this page. All they have are a few photos like the ones below which were used to illustrate an article in The Economist which had a skeptical title:
All this leads me to ask if anyone in the room asked how they’d know if the bombing was successful. Ideally this is something the president would inquire about. Certainly a Secretary of Defense ought to have asked this.
I am sure all concerned in the effort wished that their bombs had caused the mountaintop to cave in producing a large crater. Unfortunately for them, all that it resulted in were small holes in the ground.
Still, Trump’s spin machine is spinning faster than a uranium centrifuge. As explained here, that’s damn fast and not easy to achieve:
Instead of enriching uranium, Trump’s centrifuge is spinning out wishful thinking and in one case the following outright lie.
Trump wants you to believe pieces of enriched uranium (called billets) are as big as Volkswagens, in fact hundreds of them could fit in a Volkswagen.
In fact, it is the centrifuges that would be difficult to move with short notice.
Top article and bottom article.
Hegseth, like his boss, thinks that blaming the press for instilling doubt about the success of the mission is the way to convince the public. For example this…
… and this:
Of course Hegseth is just marching like a Mini-me behind Trump who set a momumental example for bad manners at the NATO press conference where he insulted reporters directly. He even called for a CNN reporter to be fired and “thrown out like a dog.”
If, for whatever reason, the raid leads to a sustainable end to the conflict and an end to Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions it can be touted as a successs. Hopefully this will be the final result.
However, Trump in his mania to brag about “obliterating” the deeply buried facility set himself up for what would be a humilating gotcha by Iran. If Iran did manage to remove all of their enriched uranium, I can imagine a scenario where they make a show of handing it over to third party nuclear inspectors as proof that they ended their bomb grade enrichment program.
That would be rich….
Update: Read article.
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