Trump's Arc de Triumph

With his unimpeded strikes on a virtually defenseless Iran, the MAGA president struts upon the world stage

CNN

First off I have to apologize for not jumping more quickly on the wave of history-making war news that broke Saturday night with Trump’s announcement that he’d sent a wing of B-2 bombers, protected by stealth fighters, to drop bunker busting bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities. Nagging medical issues have just drained my energy. The good news is that the alarming cancer and brain-aneurysm diagnoses I was confronted with in May turned out to be false alarms. The bad news is that, well, other chronic issues continue to bug me.  No escaping those.

But I digress. We here at SpyTalk are cooking up Iran-related reporting and analyses that you should see shortly. In the meantime,  I have questions. 

Such as: I have often wondered—how would Iran use a nuclear weapon if it had one (or more)?

The process of miniaturization to make a bomb that could be screwed onto the tip of a ballistic missile could take years.  (The jury’s still out on whether Iran had even made a decision to go for weaponization. As we and other news media have consistently reported in recent days and weeks, the consensus of U.S. intelligence remains that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”) 

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Iran hasn’t clandestinely enriched its stockpiles of uranium to a weapons-grade level, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted Iran has “taken the steps”to do.

But let’s say the regime has managed—or is now rushing toward—making a crude device like Little Boy, the 9,700-lb., 10 feet-by-28 inch bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. Then what? It’s hard to imagine its agents could slip such a device into Israel or its adjacent waters undetected.  Possible, but not likely.

Same for the prospect of Iran sailing such a weapon into the waters of Bahrain or Qatar, home to sprawling U.S. bases. With its modest missile attack on the U.S. base at Qatar Monday, it’s already signaling it wants to put a lid on escalation, at least with Trump.  (And late Monday Trump declared on social media that Israel and Iran have agreed to a “complete and total ceasefire.”)

But let’s say that’s an Iranian ruse—much like the fake-out Trump pulled last week when he declared he’d make a final decision on entering the war in “two weeks” while secretly green lighting the B-2 attacks. Likewise, maybe Iran is secretly preparing a much bigger response. What form would it take? 

Underground Agents

Terrorist attacks in the U.S., as the FBI and DHS warned about over the weekend? The mullahs might argue that’s a waste of scarce human resources against relatively minor targets—federal buildings, symbolic edifices like Trump Tower, synagogues and the like.

If a desperate, martyrdom-minded Iran wants to go big, it seems to me,  a more realistic goal would be the deployment of its uranium stocks in one or more so-called dirty bombs against a multitude of available targets in the Middle East or even the continental U.S.  Cheap to make, relatively easy to deploy, a single dirty bomb set off in, say, midtown Manhattan or Washington, D.C. would have catastrophic results. A stunning, 2003 BBC docudrama showed how such an attack would make London uninhabitable for decades.  

Whatever, Trump’s military intervention in the Israel-Iran war has left us and American allies vulnerable to a number of potential mass casualty possibilities. In his fury, Trump may well unleash nuclear strikes on Iran. And then where are we?  

As the likely-jarring title of this piece attests, I see Trump’s strutting today—including his offer Monday of “an olive branch” to Iran—as akin to Hitler’s vainglorious sight-seeing visit to Paris in June 1940. Of course I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler (as many on the left are wont to do these days), much less Vichy France to the Iranian regime, a horrid scourge upon its people and the world since its radical Shi’a revolution in 1979.  But I do see Trump, like Hitler in June 1940 (or, for that matter, so many of history’s gallumping despots), posturing on the world stage in Paris, basking in the limelight, a man in full,  seeing nothing but limitless possibilities for himself, for imposing his military will on the world. Barring a miracle, it’s not likely to turn out well.

Oh happy days. (PBS)