The most foundational question surrounding the U.S. war in Iran still has no definitive answer: Why did Donald Trump launch this military offensive? The president and his team have peddled a variety of justifications, all of which are badly flawed, and many of which contradict one another, undeterred by the implications of their shifting rationales.
On Wednesday, however, Trump pushed an especially provocative claim.
“If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would have had a nuclear weapon,” the Republican said.
Right off the bat, as my MS NOW colleague Jarvis DeBerry noted, Trump’s reference to “two weeks” was an obvious red flag. After all, it’s one of the president’s most notorious tells: Given his cartoonish reliance on the phrase and the frequency with which he uses it to deceive, whenever he mentions “two weeks,” skepticism is in order.
But the closer one looks at Wednesday’s claim, the worse it appears.
According to Trump, U.S. military strikes completely “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer. “We destroyed the nuclear,” the president boasted in remarks delivered in the Netherlands in June. “I said, ‘Iran will not have nuclear.’ Well, we blew it up. It’s blown up to kingdom come.”
It was not an offhand comment. In early July, the president said Iran’s nuclear program had been “set back permanently.” Days earlier, he said of possible Iranian nuclear sites, “The last thing they’re thinking about right now is nuclear. … No, I’m not worried about it at all.”
And now we’re supposed to believe, however, that over the course of just eight months, Iran went from having no nuclear program whatsoever to being two weeks away from having nuclear weapons.
At this point, I could emphasize the fact that literally all of the publicly available information points in the opposite direction. I could note that members of Congress who have received classified briefings have confirmed that no intelligence supports the claim. We could even talk about the fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as recently as last week, told reporters that Iran was “not enriching [uranium] right now.”
But as relevant as those details are, they’re also unnecessary — because what Trump described isn’t possible.
Joseph Cirincione, the vice chair of the Center for International Policy and a longtime expert on nuclear policy, told MS NOW that even if Iran could have developed material to use in a nuclear weapon, that’d be the first of multiple, time-consuming steps.
“Two weeks?” Cirincione said. “No way.”
The question for the White House, then, isn’t just why Trump launched this war — it’s also why he’s peddling obvious nonsense in trying to rationalize his decision.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
