Oh, Well, Then Again, Maybe Not: Mission (Un) Accomplished

One thing about war: it tends to impose reality upon those who want to deny it.

In that famous sequence in "Downfall," the German movie about Adolph Hitler in the bunker, Hitler is ordering around phantom Wehrmacht divisions which the generals know do not exist, to defend Berlin, to turn the tide of war against the Russians, and to sweep them from Germany.

When people talk about the miracle of Hitler having escaped the assassin's bomb which killed the officers in the room, but left Hitler unscathed, with only a shredded pair of trousers, they pointed to his escape as evidence of God's will to protect and preserve, Der Fuhrer.

But later, it was realized had Hitler been killed, his generals, and his lieutenants would likely have sued for peace and nobody outside Germany, Poland and Austria would ever have learned about the concentration camps and if the allies had agreed to terms, the Second World War might have ended like the First, with Germany unreconstructed. The total collapse of the Third Reich was necessary to reinvent Germany and establish a new order in Europe and only with Hitler fighting to the bitter end could that happen.

Now we have similar things being said about the bullet which only grazed Trump's ear.

But as Lincoln noted in his sacred Second Inaugural Address: God works in mysterious ways; "The Almighty has His own purposes; the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Now, Donald Trump asserts mission accomplished; the Iranian nuclear program has been destroyed. They can no longer enrich uranium or create an atom bomb. 

As reported in the New York Times: "There was also evidence, according to Two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days."

Trump, of course, has claimed the radi was "a complete and total success," and Iran's nuclear capabilities have been "obliterated."

Now we are parsing what "complete success" means and what "obliterated means.

If Iran moved its enriched uranium and its centrifuges and if the mountain redoubt was only damage and not destroyed, then what the raid demonstrated was that America does not have the power to stop Iran from making nuclear bombs.

But it's still early yet.

We do know one thing: We cannot believe Trump about anything. Of that we can be sure. Even his most ardent supporters have always said, "You cannot take him literally, but you can take him seriously."

Which is to say, you cannot believe the bum at all.

P.S. (Addendum 6/24/25)

Report from the "failing" New York Times:

A preliminary classified U.S. report says the American bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months, according to officials familiar with the findings.

The strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, the officials said the early findings concluded.

Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had said that if Iran tried to rush to making a bomb, it would take about three months. After the U.S. bombing run and days of attacks by the Israeli Air Force, the report by the Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months.

The report also said that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material. Iran may have moved some of that to secret locations.