Early Iran Bomb Damage Spin Falls Apart

EARLY IRAN BOMB DAMAGE SPIN FALLS APART. You know the basics of the story. After U.S. bombers hit Iranian nuclear sites, President Donald Trump quickly announced that the raid had “obliterated” the Iranian facilities. At that moment, some of Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party, plus their allies in the media, said no, no, no. The U.S. bombing didn’t obliterate anything. Instead, it did minimal damage — so minimal that the Iranian program could be up and running again in a “handful of months.”

CNN, relying on leaks from people “briefed on” a super-early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, was first to report that the bombing not only did not destroy the “core components” of Iran’s nuclear program, it likely “only set it back by months.” NBC, relying on leaks from the same DIA report, and perhaps the same people, reported the U.S. bunker-busting bombs “were not as effective as President Donald Trump said and that they set the program back by only three to six months.” And the New York Times’s version of the story said the early DIA report “estimated that the program had been delayed, but by less than six months.”

If that assessment is correct, then look at it this way: If it was true that Iran, not too long ago, was just a few months away from having a nuclear weapon, the assessment suggests that today, even after all the pounding by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran is still just a few months away from having a nuclear weapon.

How can that be? It can’t. It appears the early reports had it wrong. Was it just a mistake? Too early to tell? Cherry-picking? Spin? It’s hard to say at this point, but it is possible to say that some of the media outlets that jumped on the story have a history of jumping on stories that appear to do political damage to Trump.