Excellent pre-strike analysis.
tabletmag.com
THE BIG STORY
Late Wednesday, in advance of the expiration of President Donald Trump’s 90-day deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, there was a flurry of activity suggesting something big brewing in the Middle East. The first sign was a notice from the U.S. State Department authorizing the evacuation of all nonessential personnel from the U.S. embassy in Iraq. That was quickly followed by State Department announcements ordering all embassies within striking distance of Iranian missiles to prepare risk-mitigation strategies and restricting the travel of U.S. government employees in Israel to the major cities, as well as a notice from the Pentagon approving the voluntary evacuation of military family members from U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Asked by reporters to explain the activity, Trump, speaking before a showing of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., said simply, “You’ll have to see, thank you.”
On social media, meanwhile, open-source intelligence accounts reported what appeared to be signs of an impending strike: Israeli aircraft spotted over Syria and Iraq; video of Israeli air defenses being repositioned; surging pizza orders near the White House and Pentagon; “breaking” news that the United States had “quietly” delivered hundreds of bunker busters to Israel in recent weeks, etc. Around the same time, several reports appeared in the American press confirming that Israel was preparing for a strike. “The United States is on high alert in anticipation of a potential Israeli strike on Iran,” The Washington Post reported at 5:37 p.m. Dueling reports saying much the same thing then appeared in CBS and NBC, albeit with NBC’s sources claiming that the strike would be “unilateral” and against Trump’s wishes (unlikely), whereas CBS reported that “the Trump administration was weighing options regarding how to support Israeli military action.”
Both reports confirmed that U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff still plans to meet with the Iranians in Oman on Sunday for a sixth round of nuclear talks, and the Israeli press has reported, citing high-level Israeli government sources, that Jerusalem will likely wait to see what happens on Sunday before moving forward with a strike. Asked on Thursday if an Israeli strike was “imminent,” Trump said, “I don’t want to say imminent, but it looks like it’s something that could very well happen.” Our guess, based on the available information,is that Trump will give the Iranians one final chance to accept the U.S. offer. If they refuse, all bets are off.
To help make sense of the past 24 hours, The Scroll reached out to Lee Smith. What follows is Lee’s diagnosis of the situation.
The reports about potentially imminent Israeli or U.S.-Israeli action on Iran came as a surprise yesterday afternoon, but they shouldn’t have. Trump has been very clear on the issue since even before his second term started: Iran can’t have a bomb. It has to give up its nuclear weapons program. Trump wants it to go peacefully, but he’s warned that if that doesn’t happen, then he’ll bomb them, or allow the Israelis to bomb them on America’s behalf.
That very clear message has perhaps been obscured because this is an insanely dense communications environment. It includes foreign actors, like the Iranians themselves and their U.S.-based assets, like Trita Parsi, who have a stake in shaping U.S. messaging to their advantage. Then there are the Israelis, more specifically the anti-Netanyahu faction that is determined to see Bibi fail, no matter the cost to the country’s security. There’s also Qatar, which seems to have a very large voice right now in our media ecosystem, and its Gulf rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are less influential but still project power, and there are the Europeans. Of course, the most significant campaign is domestic, and it is not the left but voices inside MAGA, Trump’s circle, and even the administration. The purpose here is to shape a message that will turn Trump’s base against his actual policy—no bomb for Iran, and we will use military action to enforce it if necessary—so that he has to change his policy.
The problem with that tactic is that Trump’s base doesn’t want Iran to have a bomb. According to a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 84% of likely voters believe Iran cannot have a bomb. Only 9% disagree. More Americans think it’s OK for men to play in women’s sports (21%) than think Iran should have a bomb. According to the Rasmussen Reports poll, 57% favor military action to stop Iran from getting nukes, including 73% of Trump’s base who are fine with Trump bombing Iran to stop the mullahs’ nuclear weapons program..
That’s probably why the effort to countersignal Trump’s policy has been so intense. Consider the number of stories leaked by U.S. officials designed to show that Trump and Netanyahu are at odds. According to The Washington Post, for instance, former National Security Advisor Michael Waltz was in trouble because he coordinated with the Israelis on potential attack plans—which Trump had laid out as a potential response to Iranian intransigence.
And then there were stories saying that, actually, Iran wasn’t that big a problem, and in fact it wasn’t even building a bomb. That was the assessment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by Tulsi Gabbard. What was most striking about the assessment was that Joe Biden’s DNI had famously dropped the intelligence community’s rote phrase that Iran wasn’t building a bomb. Why did Trump’s DNI put the phrase back in? The effect, no doubt unintended, was to make Trump’s policy look strange: If Iran isn’t even thinking of building a bomb, why does Trump keep insisting that Iran can’t have a bomb?
It didn’t help the case for Iranian moderation that Austria’s domestic intelligence service assessed that Iran was heading toward a bomb. Lots of people doubted the analysis, but given the number of Iranian spies in Vienna and the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency is based in the Austrian capital, that service is likely as well informed on Iran’s nuclear activities as any service, after ours and Israel’s. And then, of course, the IAEA, hardly known for its aggressive posture toward Iran, released a report sketching some of what Tehran has been hiding from inspectors.
But here’s the most noteworthy aspect of the comms campaign designed to hobble Trump’s Iran policy: If Trump does approve an Israeli strike or join in one, he will have used the misdirection to his advantage. Just last week, he confirmed that he’d asked Netanyahu to cool it with military plans—it wouldn’t be appropriate, he said. But as yesterday’s reports suggest, the United States and the Israelis seem to have been coordinating all this time.
We don’t know what will happen next. But for now, it appears the pressure is back on Iran, which is in a much tougher spot today than it was two days ago. As for the Iranian-supporting “realists,” it seems they might have gotten caught in a communications environment they thought they dominated but that was, in the end, just their own echo chamber |
