Jon Finer:
Look, Geoff, it’s worth pausing just for a second on the extraordinary operation that our armed forces conducted in taking this strike.
We are fortunate in the United States to have the most capable military in the world. We ask, Democratic administrations, Republican administrations, the impossible of them, and they deliver time and again. And I have no reason to question that these planes did just as the administration reported, flew more than 30 hours from the United States, dropped their ordnance in a very small, very precise area, and hit the target.
The question now is, what actually is the impact of the strikes? And here I think the administration has not done themselves any favors. President Trump has had a degree of discomfort with the intelligence community going back to his first term, in part because I believe he likes to characterize the facts that frame a situation.
And so even before he took the strikes, he took issue with his director of national intelligence saying that Iran was not seeking a nuclear weapon, which has been the position of the intelligence community now going back at least 15 years.
And then, in the immediate aftermath of the strikes, he came out and said the targets were obliterated kind of minutes, it seemed, after the ordnance hit the target, before it was really possible, I think, to know what is called the bomb damage assessment, the assessment of what has actually happened.
Then the intelligence community put out information quietly, leaked it. That drove us crazy when I was in the government. I’m sure it drove this administration crazy — suggesting maybe not as much damage had been done. And then, today, you saw the administration put pushback very strongly, the president, the secretary of defense, as you said, the director of CIA.
So you now have the Trump administration seeming to be in an argument with itself about the outcome, which is not confidence-inspiring at a time when clarity is paramount.
