TRUMP’S DECISION. There are reports that President Donald Trump has reviewed U.S. military plans to attack Iran. But the president says he has not yet made the crucial decision to actually order an attack, which apparently involves dropping bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s deep-underground Fordow nuclear facility.

Trump appeared to rule out quick action when he released a brief statement Thursday afternoon, saying that he still hopes for a negotiated solution: “Based on the fact that there is a substantial chance of negotiation that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” the president said. So it appears any breathless waiting for news might have to wait at least 14 more days.

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Two fundamental questions must be answered before Trump issues any orders. One, is a U.S. attack necessary to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? And two, if the United States did attack, would it work? That is, would it keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons?

On the first question, think about it this way: We’ve heard several estimates of how close Iran was to a nuclear weapon two weeks ago. The short version was that Iran was very close, within months, to building a weapon, and thus posed a grave danger to Israel and the U.S. 

But what is the estimate on how close Iran is to a nuclear weapon right now, after more than a week of intense Israeli attacks designed to cripple the nuclear program? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said Israeli attacks have set back the Iranian effort “a great deal of time,” and of course, Israel is not finished with its current military action.

“What Israel has done to Iran is just astounding,” former Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster said on Fox News Wednesday. “They’ve taken out the whole nuclear supply chain. There are still these buried sites like Fordow and one other deep buried site as well. They’ve taken out the missiles, a lot of their missile capability, the missile supply chain. Military leadership — they took out the head of their armed forces, and then three days later, they took out the guy who took his job from him.”

And that is just a partial list of what Israel has done in the last week or so. So if the question of the moment is, “How far is Iran away from a nuclear weapon?” The answer is, a lot farther away than it was a couple of weeks ago. The bottom line is that Israel, without any U.S. bombing, appears to be fixing the Iran nuclear problem for quite a while into the future. 

Could the nuclear problem come back someday? Of course. But might conditions change, and it doesn’t come back? That is also possible. But if the goal is to make sure Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, then Israel is achieving that goal, for a significant time, without U.S. forces joining the war.

The second fundamental question is whether the 30,000-pound U.S. bunker buster bomb, if dropped by a U.S. B-2 bomber, would work — that is, would it keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons? The short answer is we don’t know. Is Fordow simply too deep in the ground — beyond the bunker buster’s capability — to be destroyed by an aerial attack? Would a bunker buster attack have to be preceded or followed by conventional bombing? Trump is said to be asking questions such as these.

It is important to know the answers — if there are answers — ahead of time, because if the U.S. did attack, and that attack did not work, pressure would build for the U.S. to attack some more, and then some more, to get the job done. Where that would end might not be clear.

But remember here, the goal is to make sure Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. Does that mean the problem has to be solved forever — that is, to ensure that Iran never, ever, ever has a nuclear weapon? Or does it mean to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon for a significant period of time, during which Israel would take additional actions to make sure it does not recover and revive its nuclear program?

Look at this Netanyahu interview, referenced earlier, from the Times of Israel: “Asked how far Israel has set back the Iranian nuclear program at this stage, [Netanyahu] answers by repeating that the goal is that ‘it must be destroyed’ and describing it as ‘like a cancer. You know, when you have a cancer that threatens to kill you, you cut it out. You also do other treatments, and it could be that it returns one day. But I estimate that we are setting them back a great deal of time … and we’re not stopping.… We are truly carrying out root canal treatment.”

That leaves the question of whether Israel needs the U.S. to attack Iran to finish the root canal. The answer could well be no. And if it is no, why would the U.S. get involved in fighting a war, with all the uncertainty and bad things that could happen, when Israel is quite willingly doing the job itself? Israel has, after all, shown amazing resourcefulness in its multi-front war since Oct. 7 — think the Hezbollah exploding beeper scheme. It no doubt has plans of its own to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities with or without American help.

One last note. Underlying much of the argument is the question of the accuracy of intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program. When it comes to that, Americans who lived through the first 10 years of this century are duly cautious. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq based on faulty intelligence concerning supposed weapons of mass destruction. Disaster followed. No one has described it better than the man who made the decision to invade, former President George W. Bush, in his memoir, Decision Points:

“I knew the failure to find WMD would transform the public perception of the war. While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility — my credibility — that would shake the confidence of the American people. No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”

No, the Israel-Iran situation in 2025 is not the same as the Iraq situation in 2003. But for Americans, the Iraq debacle is a constant reminder of the importance of going to war only for the soundest of reasons and only when other options have been exhausted. As a matter of fact, Trump won the Republican nomination, and then the White House, in 2016 by stressing what a terrible misuse of American military power and prestige the Iraq misadventure had been. It’s certainly something Trump doesn’t want to do himself.