Commentary by Stephen Macaulay
Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, certainly deserves some sort of acknowledgement for his spinning of the difficult-to-budge, or the rationale for the war in Iran.
On ABC’s This Week Martha Raddatz noted that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth said after Operation Midnight Hammer that the Iranian nuclear facilities had been obliterated.
Turner, creditably, acknowledged, “actually, they said it.”
That factual observation would have put them and him in a box.
If the nuclear material was now, in Trump’s term, “nuclear dust,” saying that almost as though it is as lethal as the sprinkles distributed by Tinker Bell (this, of course, was in the context of his claiming that the US has won the war which, months later, still seems to be, well, a war), then there would have been no reason for Operation Epic Fury, no reason to have lost brave service people, no reason to spend billions of dollars, no reason to make the homeland less safe by squandering munitions that seem to have done little beyond providing Hegseth with good optics for the press conferences he used to hold (the last one was March 31: seems like there must be some pent-up podium thumping in the high-T Hegseth).
Turner couldn’t leave it at that and hope that Raddatz asked him about something else — maybe LeBron James signing with the 76ers because James began his professional career in Ohio, with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
No, Turner said:
“But actually what they had said was that the actions that they had taken at their nuclear enrichment sites had been obliterated, certainly not their aspirations for nuclear weapons or the nuclear weapons program.”
Now while the pronouns are a bit bollixed up in that statement, the first two “theys” are the Trump administration, then the “theirs” the Iranians.
But here’s the thing about that rational that is unbelievable: “their nuclear enrichment sites had been obliterated, certainly not their aspirations for nuclear weapons.”
In other words, while they can’t make nuclear weapons because Operation Midnight Hammer put an end to that, they want to makenuclear weapons.
And just how is it that dropping bombs and firing cruise missiles will put an end to what some unidentified people want to do?
On June 4 the New York Post reported:
“President Trump on Thursday said the Space Force has ‘very powerful cameras’ trained on Iran’s destroyed nuclear sites, scouting for any attempts Iran may take to break out the enriched uranium still buried deep below.
“’Every inch of that land has cameras on it,’ he said. ‘We have about nine of them, and they’re on, and we cover it. So, if anybody even got near it, we would know what we had to.’”
So physically, the US has the matter under control.
The issue, apparently, at least according to Turner, is the psychological one: those desires to have a nuclear weapon.
On March 13 Trump said in an interview on Fox News Radio that he would know when the war was over “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”
So will he, or Hegseth or someone else in the administration know when the Iranians no longer have “aspirations for nuclear weapons?”
Does this mean the war will come to an end only when someone in the US thinks that Iranian leaders or scientists or engineers or whomever are no longer thinking about nuclear weapons?
How will they know? Will they feel it in their bones?
Macaulay is The Hustings’ pundit-at-large, writing primarily for the right (conservative) column.