Trump's Iran choice: Last-chance diplomacy or a bunker-busting bomb
If Trump holds back, it could well mean that Israel's main objective in the war is never completed.
'Fordo has always been the crux of this thing,' said Brett McGurk, who worked on Middle East issues for four successive U.S. presidents, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. 'If this ends with Fordo still enriching, then it's not a strategic gain.'
That has been true for a long time, and over the past two years the U.S. military has refined the operation, under close White House scrutiny. The exercises led to the conclusion that one bomb would not solve the problem; any attack on Fordo would have to come in waves, with B-2s releasing one bomb after another down the same hole. And the operation would have to be executed by an American pilot and crew.
This was all in the world of war planning until the opening salvos Friday morning in Tehran, Iran's capital, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes, declaring that Israel had discovered an 'imminent' threat that required 'preemptive action.' New intelligence, he suggested without describing the details, indicated that Iran was on the cusp of turning its fuel stockpile into weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials who have followed the Iranian program for years agree that Iranian scientists and nuclear specialists have been working to shorten the time it would take to manufacture a nuclear bomb, but they saw no huge breakthroughs.
Yet they agree with McGurk and other experts on one point: If the Fordo facility survives the conflict, Iran will retain the key equipment it needs to stay on a pathway to the bomb, even if it would first have to rebuild much of the nuclear infrastructure that Israel has left in ruins over four days of precision bombing.
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Netanyahu has pressed for the United States to make its bunker busters available since the Bush administration, so far to no avail. But people who have spoken to Trump in recent months say the topic has come up repeatedly in his conversations with the prime minister. When Trump has been asked about it, he usually avoids a direct answer.
Now the pressure is on. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who resigned in a split with Netanyahu, told CNN's Bianna Golodryga on Monday that 'the job has to be done, by Israel, by the United States,' an apparent reference to the fact that the bomb would have to be dropped by an American pilot in a US airplane. He said that Trump had 'the option to change the Middle East and influence the world.'
And Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who often speaks for the traditional, hawkish members of his party, said on CBS on Sunday that 'if diplomacy is not successful' he will 'urge President Trump to go all in to make sure that, when this operation is over, there's nothing left standing in Iran regarding their nuclear program.'
'If that means providing bombs, provide bombs,' he said, adding, in a clear reference to the Massive Ordinance Penetrator, 'whatever bombs. If it means flying with Israel, fly with Israel.'
But Republicans are hardly united in that view. And the split in the party over the decision of whether to make use of one of the Pentagon's most powerful conventional weapons to help one of America's closest allies has highlighted a far deeper divide. It is not only about crippling the centrifuges of Fordo; it is also about MAGA's view of what kinds of wars the United States should avoid at all costs.
The anti-interventionist wing of the party, given its most prominent voice by influential podcaster Tucker Carlson, has argued that the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is nothing but downside risk in getting deeply into another Middle East war. On Friday, Carlson wrote that the United States should 'drop Israel' and 'let them fight their own wars.'
For now, Trump can afford to keep one foot in both camps. By making one more run at coercive diplomacy, he can make the case to the MAGA faithful that he is using the threat of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator to bring the conflict to a peaceful end. And he can tell the Iranians that they are going to cease enriching uranium one way or the other, either by diplomatic agreement or because a GBU-57 imploded the mountain.
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