Trump’s hasty war on Iran risks dragging US into another endless conflict

He didn’t take two weeks to make up his mind whether or not to bomb Iran, only two days. US President Donald Trump is not a patient man.

But he has just started another American “forever war” in the Middle East, so he will have plenty of time to work on his self-control.

Let’s start with the immediate issue. Assume for a moment that Iran was really working to build nuclear weapons, allegedly to destroy Israel.

Did the US bombing of the Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan nuclear enrichment sites really blast down through 90m of rock and permanently eliminate any skulduggery the Iranians were up to there?

Wrong question. If there really was a large stock of highly enriched uranium stored under all that rock, the Iranians have had a week to divide it up into dozens or hundreds of packets and hide it at safe sites all over the country.

What would you do if you knew somebody was coming to bomb you in a few days? Then there’s this business about how highly enriched Iran’s uranium is.

About 90% is weapons-grade and Iran had already enriched a lot of uranium to 60%, so the American B-2s have to start bombing right now.

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No time to lose. No time even to think. Nonsense. The gun-type atomic bomb just fires one chunk of enriched uranium at another chunk and so long as the two chunks add up to a critical mass the bomb explodes.

That critical mass can be quite small if the uranium is highly enriched, but it will still work at 60% although the package will be heavier and bulkier. There was no deadline.

That type of nuclear weapon is so simple and fool-proof that there is no real need to “test” it, but how was Iran going to deliver it?

A ballistic missile, presumably, because drones and cruise missiles can’t handle the weight or the range, but few of Iran’s ballistic missiles get through Israel’s missile defences.

However, for the sake of argument, imagine that one of Iran’s putative nine or 10 nuclear missiles does make it through and destroys an Israeli town or city.

We are piling improbable on top of implausible here, but what would Israel do then? Israel would probably respond by levelling Iran, which it is more than capable of doing.

It has the full triad of nuclear weapons, at least 100 of them but up to 400, of all sizes up to thermonuclear. Israel can sterilise the whole of Iran if it chooses.

None of these stories we are told makes much sense, so let’s try a different approach. What did the 18 US intelligence agencies tell the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, about Iran’s nuclear weapons in March?

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They told her Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, they explained Tehran only created a nuclear weapons programme after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran with US help in the 1980s.

After Saddam was overthrown in 2003, it became clear that there had never been any Iraqi nuclear weapons, it was all a bluff.

Thereupon Iran closed its own nuclear weapons programme down and has never resumed it since. It’s all just history now.

Trump has fallen for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just as hard as he fell for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and the die is cast.

It is likely to be a long, ugly war, conducted mostly by aircraft and missiles at first, but there will be boots on the ground if it goes on long enough.

An anti-clerical revolution in Iran could take the country down another road, but if the regime survives, the war could last for many years.

Persia was the rival superpower in Roman times and 1 000 years later it was the other superpower in Ottoman times. It’s not a superpower any more, but then neither is the US.

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