
Donald Trump’s inability to keep his yapper shut appears to have undermined the rationale behind the bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Pro tip: if you’re going to bomb another country, don’t tip them off beforehand.
Remember that Trump posted to social media that “(e)veryone should evacuate Tehran!” and that he was leaving the G7 summit not to negotiate a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, but for something “much bigger.”
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It wasn’t hard to figure out what Trump was getting at there.
The Iranians appear to have used the tips from Trump to their advantage. Satellite images released by Maxar Techonologies, a defense contractor headquartered in Colorado, showed 16 cargo trucks on an access road leading up to the mountain complex at Fordow two days before the bombing raid, but a day later, the trucks had been moved away from the site.
Planners in the Pentagon had to devise a workaround to keep our planes from getting shot down on the raid that Trump had told the world was coming, so a plan was put into place to send two fleets of B-2 bombers from Missouri, one headed west and left visible on flight trackers, the other headed east, flying stealthily.
That, at least, kept Iranian defense forces from shooting our planes out of the sky, but it’s looking like the saber-rattling from Trump in the leadup to the bombing raid gave the Iranian military time to move their nuclear materials to safety.
“We’ve got a lot of questions to ask. What next? Were the facilities destroyed? And my real question is, the American intelligence community said a week ago that Iran had not moved towards a nuclear weapon. Have they changed their position? Did they get it wrong?” U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a video posted to Bluesky on Monday.
It seems what happened here is, Trump let himself be talked into bombing Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu, and because Trump can’t seem to get out of his own way when it comes to anything, the operation was not only put at risk of becoming a catastrophe, it may very well end up pushing the Iranian regime to speed up its nuclear operation.
“My biggest worry here is, even though we tried to set them back in developing a nuclear weapon, this could be the moment that they make a decision to start building a bomb and further enriching that uranium,” U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said Monday in a TV hit on CNN.