Hegseth says US strikes on Iran were ‘historically successful’ after ayatollah downplays impact

The battle of the narrativespublished at 14:37 British Summer Time

14:37 BST

Frank Gardner
Security correspondent

Image source, Reuters

No surprises there then: the Pentagon briefing we have just
watched is directly at odds with the claims made by Iran’s Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier today.

The US, said Iran’s leader, who has only just emerged from
hiding, had “failed to achieve anything significant” in its attacks
on Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Yet those attacks, specifically the one on
the most important site at Fordo, were “a historic success” according
to the US Defence Secretary, destroying or “obliterating” Iran’s
nuclear programme.

They can’t both be right.

So let’s break this down. Did those 12 massive US
bunker-busting bombs, the GBU-57s, all hit their targets in the mountain at
Fordo? Yes.

Were they the culmination of years of painstaking study by
the Pentagon on how best to attack Iran’s deeply buried uranium enrichment
programme? Yes. Did they choose the best line of attack – the ventilation
shafts – then detonate at the right depth to achieve maximum effect? Yes.

But that’s not the whole story.

We simply don’t know, beyond conjecture, what state those
centrifuges are in, down there in that subterranean hall, because neither US
nor UN inspectors have been down there. Crucially, we don’t know where the missing 408kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) has gone to.

And we don’t know – because this was a Pentagon briefing,
not an intelligence assessment – how much of a nuclear knowledge base Iran
retains that could soon, potentially be applied to restarting its programme in
secret.

So in short, from a purely tactical point of view, the B2
pilots who flew that extraordinary 37 hour mission to drop those 13-tonne
bunker-busting bombs fulfilled their mission to the letter.

But when it comes
to the question of whether Iran’s suspected nuclear programme has actually been
destroyed (as the US claims), or merely set back, the jury is still very much
still out.