Here we go again...
Someone opened up the wrist watch.
I have a confession to make. Last night, at dinner, I told my guest that, in my view, President Trump’s ‘a decision within two weeks’ reply to reporters asking about whether he’d bomb Iran was likely to be another bluff. Financial markets had developed an unflattering shorthand for the President’s behaviour when imposing tariffs on random foreign countries – ‘T.A.C.O.’
In case you hadn’t heard, this stands for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.
Would this be another ‘TACO’ moment?
I’m not much good as a betting man, it seems. Within hours of my making this bland assurance during the pudding course, B-2 ‘Stealth’ bombers had discharged their payloads of a pair of GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOP), hitting three targets, all said to be Uranium enrichment sites.
As the range of these aircraft is only about six thousand nautical miles, they’d have been refuelled in mid-air on their way from Missouri a couple of times. This means they’d already have been in the air as I wielded my spoon and fork. My guest may never trust me again.
I mean, my advice on how to counter attacks by hordes of hungry gastropods was almost as inaccurate as my opinion on whether Donny wanted to play soldiers.
As Americans say, I should ‘stay in my lane’ – with the slugs and snails…
I gave this piece the title, ‘Here we go again’ as it seems most U.S. Presidents are faced at some point with a national-scale situation in which they must contemplate use of armed forces.
In recent times, the ones we know about (there are probably others not in the public domain) would be:
a) Carter’s attempt to rescue captured Americans from the embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution and his withdrawal of the SALT 2 treaty following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He will have been presented with a suite of possible actions by his military advisers. His choices perhaps led to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 US election.
b) Ronald Reagan was involved in several conflicts. In the Soviet / Afghan war (he supplied weapons and training to the Mujahideen fighters) and 1983, he invaded Grenada to topple the communist government and rescue Americans. He was drawn into the Iran/Iraq war too, eventually siding with Iraq. However, he fell foul of the so-called ‘Iran-Contra’ affair, selling arms secretly to Iran in exchange for releasing American prisoners.
c) George HW Bush’s Invasion of Panama in 1989 & the first Gulf War in 1990 after Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait.
d) Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovan war plus strikes in Iraq in 1998 because Iraq wasn’t allowing full access to international weapons inspectors.
e) George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, including Afghanistan (following September 11th, 2001 World Trade Centre attacks) and Iraq, the second Gulf War in 2003 searching for Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction – which never came to light.
f) Barack Obama inherited the two conflicts above and he approved the NATO-led overthrowing of Col. Ghaddafi’s Libyan regime in 2011. He also authorised a number of individual hits, such as the assassination of Osama bin Laden, head of Al Qaeda.
g) In his first term, in 2017, Donald Trump launched a limited number of missiles to punish Bashar Al Assad in Syria for his use of chemical weapons.
h) Joe Biden supported Ukraine against the Russian invasion but refused to strike Russia directly. Equally he supported Israel in their attacks on Hamas in Gaza, but did not join in directly.
i) On the campaign trail, Donald Trump made great play of saying he would never enter what he described as ‘forever wars’ as many of his predecessors had done. I read that many Make America Great Again supporters are criticising his actions of yesterday. In doing so, he ignored the public advice of his head of intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) that Iran was nowhere near achieving the level of enrichment of their Uranium stocks required to make a weapon. I can only speculate at the interaction between them which has prompted her to change her tune. During yesterday, she admitted that the situation might change within six to nine months.
History only records the headlines of these events. In yesterday’s case, a little scientific detail is helpful, I feel.
Naturally occurring Uranium contains only a tiny proportion of fissile isotope, U-235 (less than 1%). Boosting the proportion of this volatile isotope to between 3% and 5% is needed to sustain a nuclear reaction to create electrical power. The rest is U-238. If the material to be concentrated is placed in a centrifuge in gaseous form, the heavier U-238 migrates to the outside and can be removed. Repeated rounds of centrifuging create higher concentrations of U-235. It is said that a nuclear bomb can be made with as little as 20% concentration. But countries with long experience of making nuclear weapons know that concentrations up to 90% make for a lighter and more useful and powerful munition.
It is now being claimed that Iran had already amassed stocks of Uranium enriched to 30%. Ample, you will now understand, to make a nuclear bomb. How much? How many Kilograms? We may never know.
Importantly, did they move it out of harm’s way before the U.S. attack? Time will tell.
In 1985, a former boss (ex-Army) described the Middle East to me as resembling a wrist watch. On the surface, all is peaceful; all is calm and predictable. Things tick along quietly. But if you remove the back of the watch, springs and gears and levers fly off in an uncontrolled manner – and can never be put back into its case. He was talking about removal from power of the typical strongman head of a country – what we refer to as ‘regime change’.
What was started last night is a dangerous course of action. We hope that Iran’s enrichment capability has been removed in addition to any stocks of weapons grade material they had. The back of the watch may have been taken off again. The region will never be the same.
