Iran’s underground nuclear facility, Fordow, is inoperable. This we know with certainty.
The precise extent of the damage remains unclear. (Totally destroyed? Mostly destroyed? Damaged beyond repair? Prohibitively costly to fix?) Amid this uncertainty, many “America First” voices who ferociously opposed American intervention in Iran — and warned World War III would break out if the U.S. struck — have grasped for a consolation prize by declaring the mission a failure.
These “America First” isolationists, including Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor-Green, took the first report of minimum damage in Fordow and ran. Our nation’s most-respected media outlet, CNN, first reported that the bunker busters didn’t do the job. That report, however, was based on a low-confidence Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment pulled from satellite imagery. As others have pointed out, “The CNN reporters who broke the story have histories of sharing intelligence assessments from anonymous sources that quickly fell apart.”
The vicissitude of the reports, however, did not matter. Bannon and Curt Mills, executive director at the American Conservative, lapped up the DIA report and preached the dubious consensus that Iran could rebuild its capabilities in months, all the while claiming to be the true voice of “MAGA.”
Of course, the “America First” isolationists are wildly out of step with much of the base they claim to represent. While Mills has advanced the thesis of a “MAGA split” over Israel and Iran, the data radically reject this thesis. Eighty-five percent of all Republicans approve of America’s strikes on Iran, according to a recent YouGov poll, while a whopping 94 percent of “MAGA” Republicans support the strike. A Harvard poll found similar consensus: nearly 80 percent of GOP voters thought the administration should support an Israeli effort to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons program, if no acceptable deal with Iran was reached over its nuclear weapons.
These naysayers are much more aligned with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party on the matter. The same YouGov poll found that 94 percent of Democrats were “very/somewhat concerned” that U.S. airstrikes could lead to wider war.
Let us remember that the IDF, with help from Mossad, has already eliminated the heads of the Iranian nuclear program. There are hardly any Iranian nuclear scientists left, and they’re not about to clock back into work in the morning. The Iranian regime is in shambles. Leading commanders of the IRGC have been meticulously and precisely eliminated.
Those who preach that Fordow was a failure are (intentionally, I presume) missing the point. While it is very good that the strikes caused serious physical damage to Iranian nuclear capabilities, it is more important that they entirely reshaped the negotiating dynamics between Iran and the U.S. — dynamics which have been working against American interests for the last few decades, especially under Obama.
No more can the Ayatollah weasel his way through international agencies and inhale American funding while working toward a nuclear weapon. Iran knows now, fully and concretely, that any continued non-compliance will result in serious consequences.
While victory wrought by force ought never devolve into macho triumphalism — as Churchill famously penned, “in victory, magnanimity” — Americans are celebrating our pilots’ success and the redemption of American leadership in the Middle East.