By The Free Press editorial board | Commentary, The Free Press
President Trump promised he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Last night, with seven B-2 bombers and a dozen 30,000-pound bombs, he made good on that vow. The world is better off for it.
Trump announced Saturday evening that the U.S. had completed a “spectacularly successful” strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz, Esfahan, and Fordow. The last of those is a heavily fortified facility buried some 300 feet deep in a mountain in Iran’s Qom Province. Although Israel has bunker busting bombs, none have the size and destructive power of the most advanced American bombs, with the capability of destroying or severely damaging the site.
In a moment of political decisiveness and courage, Trump deployed those bombs, despite strenuous objections from the “restrainers” in his administration and parts of the MAGA coalition.
“There’s no military that could’ve done what we did,” Trump said during a brief speech to the nation Saturday night. He is correct. As Niall Ferguson and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant recently noted in these pages, Fordow was essentially impervious to assault. There was one bomb that could cut through its defenses: America’s GBU 57A/B Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP). And there was only one plane built to deliver that bomb: the American B-2 Spirit.
“With a single exertion of its unmatched military strength,” Ferguson and Gallant wrote, “the United States can shorten the war, prevent wider escalation, and end the principal threat to Middle Eastern stability. It can also send a signal to those other authoritarian powers who have been Iran’s enablers that American deterrence is back.”
That is exactly what this White House has done.
It is impossible to know at this early stage whether the bombing strike completely destroyed their targets. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the three sites that were targeted sustained “severe damage and destruction.” But an anonymous “senior U.S. official” told The New York Times that the most important of the three sites, Fordow, was not completely destroyed. In the hours since the American bombing campaign, Israel has continued to strike at Iranian missile and drone sites, while Iran has hit Israeli cities with missile attacks.
Americans are skeptical of the U.S. involving itself in wars anywhere, let alone the Middle East. And for good reason: the memory of decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 7,000 Americans and untold Mideasterners who died during those wars. But none of that should obscure the reality that Iran has been a menace to the region and to America for decades.
It has the blood of so many Americans on its hands: from our GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan to our Marines in Lebanon to the attempted assassination of Trump himself—all the while relentlessly pursuing nuclear arms. There is no question that the region and the free world are safer without a nuclear Iran—and the inevitable arms race it would trigger, as other volatile countries in the region raced to get their own nuclear arms.
To us, preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon seems simply a matter of common sense. Yet so many Democrats apparently find it impossible to praise this president.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the best-known progressive in the House of Representatives, said that the strike against Iran was grounds for impeaching the president. “The president’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on X. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries complained that Trump had “failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed Jeffries. “We must enforce the War Powers Act,” he said. Congressional authorization for a bombing run in the Mideast? Seriously?
On X, Jamie Metzl, who had been a member of Bill Clinton’s national security committee—and, by his own admission, “a vocal critic” of most of Trump’s policies—praised the president on Sunday “for bold and courageous actions in support of America’s core national interests, as he took last night.” But he was the exception among his tribe.
To those criticizing the bombing of Iran’s nuclear program, we must ask: Is it really not possible to oppose Trump while also acknowledging that preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power is an unambiguously good thing?
It is understandable that Democrats don’t want the U.S. to become embroiled in another “forever war” in the Mideast. Most Republicans, whether MAGA or not, don’t want that either. But this is not another Iraq or Afghanistan.
There are no plans for American—or for that matter, even Israeli—boots on the ground in Iran. The closest thing to ground forces in this air and intelligence war are the networks of agents deployed masterfully so far by Israel’s Mossad.
President Trump has always been clear that he has no interest in prolonged American intervention overseas. He has also said, time and again, that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. Consider how Russia’s nuclear arsenal prevented the Biden administration from acting more decisively in the early stages of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—precisely for fear of a nuclear response. Imagine, now, Iran with the same implicit threat to fire a nuclear weapon against its enemies. Iran has been the nexus for terror for decades; a nuclear weapon would make them a true danger not just to Israel but to the entire world.
It is our hope that Saturday’s attack will have the effect of both freeing the U.S. from a prolonged foreign entanglement while quickly and decisively preventing the regime in Tehran from building this most horrifying of weapons.
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