There are two apt sayings for this current situation facing the White House in the wake of the Trump-ordered bombings against Iran's nuclear facilities. First, what's worse in war-time decision-making than doing the wrong thing? Doing it incompletely. Second, it is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.

And so here President Trump and his top officials find themselves, defending the 'limited' strikes and proclaiming the destruction of Iran's nuclear program and enrichment capability in the face of a skeptical media. The escalation dialectic - which the mainstream media is so good at - begins...

The heat is on an the NATO summit in The Hague, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters, "Of course we’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now because this information is for internal purposes, battle damage assessments."

Referencing yesterday's leaked DIA report which strongly suggests Iran's nuclear program is "mostly intact" - he continued, "And CNN and others are trying to spin it to make the president look bad when this was an overwhelming success."

And Trump himself said, "They really don’t know." And in response to the contrary intelligence, "I think Israel is gonna be telling us very soon because [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is going to have people Involved in that whole situation."

"This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum that’s in this room. And not all of you are… CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick," Trump said. "And what they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less."

And here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio, somewhat hedging:

“(Iran’s nuclear) program today has been set behind significantly from where it was a week ago. It is in far worse shape today than it was a week ago because of US actions and because some of the actions Israelis took,” Rubio told Politico.

“So, the bottom line is they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action,” he said, adding that “very significant, substantial damage” was done to a “variety of different components.”

Iran has meanwhile admitted that nuclear sites are 'badly damaged' - perhaps in hopes of giving Trump what he wants in terms of PR to ensure the bombing will stop and ceasefire will hold; however, the Iranians have also vowed to pursue their nuclear energy program without interruption and that it remains a matter of national sovereignty. 

To review of the leaked DIA assessment, one official had told CNN: "So the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops." The White House acknowledged the existence of the report marked top secret but said they disagreed with it.

Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth are in Europe proclaiming the 'overwhelming success' of the strikes:

So this appears yet another case of the White House disagreeing with its own intelligence community (IC) - in an ongoing awkward situation which has Iraq war vibes. However, without doubt the IC is still working on an overall consensus, based likely on several different intel threads, and across agencies.

One obvious danger from the perspective of Western decision-makers (and Israel): if Iran was not intent on getting a bomb before, they likely are now - given their very existence is under threat.

• • * 

More geopolitical developments and headlines via Newsquawk: