Has the US started its next ‘forever war'?
He didn't take two weeks to make up his mind whether or not to bomb Iran; only two days. Donald Trump is not a patient man.
But he may have 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: 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. 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 very few of Iran's ballistic missiles get through Israel's missile defences.
However, just 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 the thermonuclear. Israel can sterilise the whole of Iran if it chooses (although the fallout and the climatic effects would be a major inconvenience for everybody).
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 national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard about Iran's nuclear weapons last March?
They told her that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Indeed, they explained that Tehran only created a nuclear weapons programme (which never got very far) 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.
Why did Iran start enriching uranium past the 3.5% limit that it accepted in the 2015-2030 deal negotiated by Barack Obama?
Because Donald Trump tore up that deal in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions on Iran, which had observed the agreement faithfully up to that point.
Tehran waited two years, then started gradually raising the level of enrichment — and did not hide it. It was trying to exert some pressure on the other signatories to drop the sanctions and restore the 2015 deal. Iran had no other leverage, and those who try to use this as proof that it was seeking nuclear weapons are deliberately ignoring the history of the affair.
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 (both strong men with criminal tendencies), and the die was cast.
• Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
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