President Trump didn’t listen to Tulsi Gabbard, his Director of National Intelligence, and he was right.
A few days earlier, Tulsi listened to President Trump, and she was pathetic.
Back in March, Miss Gubbard, having reviewed piles of intelligence information, testified before Congress that yes, Iran had stockpiled nuclear materials, but no, Iran wasn’t building nuclear weapons.
Since I haven’t read her entire testimony, I don’t know how she explained what Iran was stockpiling those materials for, and building secret facilities to refine them.
As the country is one of the world’s top oil producers, its need for nuclear energy doesn’t seem especially urgent. Even if it were, the country was already producing uranium refined to 60 per cent. That strikes me as a bit of an overkill (pun intended): nuclear power stations don’t need anything purer than 3.5 per cent.
But hey, I have no access to heaps of intelligence provided by half a dozen US services, and Tulsi does. Nor do I have at my disposal, as she does, a huge staff of analysts who go through the data with a fine-toothed comb. Hence, I have to bow to superior expertise.
But then, a few days ago, President Trump who had already made the decision to wipe out Iran’s nuclear facilities, said Tulsi was “wrong”. What intelligence really showed was that Iran had a “tremendous amount of material” and could have a bomb “within months”.
Tulsi instantly concurred, and actually went the president one better. Iran, she said, could have nuclear weapons “within weeks”. Her congressional testimony had been taken out of context by “dishonest media”.
The media may be dishonest but they do understand English, especially the primitive variety of it spoken by Miss Gubbard. I can’t imagine they lied when reporting her assurance that no nukes were in Iran’s pipeline. Nor could they have possibly misunderstood a simple binary proposition: Iran either developing nuclear weapons or not.
I have a much better explanation for this little mishap. Tulsi Gubbard is an incompetent sycophant who regularly commits the deadliest sin of an intelligence officer: telling her superiors only what they want to hear.
For example, she makes strong pro-Putin noises because she knows that’s what pleases Trump at the moment. If Trump changes his tune, Tulsi will sing in chorus, possibly citing new intelligence. Back in March, it suited Trump to believe that Iran wasn’t trying to build nuclear weapons, so that’s what she told him.
For the president then to say that intelligence really showed something very different was tantamount to agreeing with my description of Tulsi as an incompetent sycophant. Sycophancy Trump clearly doesn’t mind, but sometimes it no longer makes up for incompetence in his eyes.
Let’s remember that US presidents get daily briefings from top intelligence officials. Hence Trump saw exactly the same data as Tulsi had seen, and read exactly the same conclusions drawn by the analysts.
Discounting the idea that Iran wasn’t over-refining uranium beyond any peaceful application in March but has since begun to do so, Trump a) knows that Tulsi misleads him and b) is no longer prepared to tolerate that because he now wants to hear the truth.
The truth is that the ayatollahs have been working towards developing nuclear weapons – there is absolutely no doubt on that score. It’s also true that they are crazy enough to use such weapons on Israel, especially since we now know her Iron Dome is rather porous.
That could happen within months, as Trump said, or within weeks, as Tulsi changed her mind to admit. But either way, that’s not a chance either Israel or the US could take.
For it can’t be gainsaid that such a scenario would be mortally dangerous not just for Israel but for the whole world. Israel would doubtless respond in kind, and a nuclear war would break out in the Middle East, with a good chance of its spreading outwards.
The ayatollahs’ hatred of the West in general is only exceeded by their hatred of Israel, and if their missiles can break through Israel’s defences, I doubt the defences of France or Britain would be more impregnable.
With a little help from her Russian ally, Iran could even conceivably get ICBMs with enough range to hit America’s eastern seaboard. After all, ‘Death to America’ rivals ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the list of popular Iranian chants, and the mullahs sing it from their minarets with the same febrile conviction.
That’s why Trump made the decision to join Israel’s attempts to defang Iran’s nuclear capability. I don’t know whether it has been obliterated, as the president claims, or only badly downgraded, but in any case the decision was morally correct and strategically sound.
As a side benefit, even if Trump may not see it as such, Iran will no longer be in a position to offer meaningful help to her military ally, Russia. Having lost his Syrian foothold in the Middle East, Putin will now be deprived of an even more powerful ally, one capable of supplying weapons for the war on the Ukraine.
As for Tulsi Gubbard, she was one of Trump’s eccentric appointments inspired by his seeing loyalty to him personally as not only a necessary condition, but at times also a sufficient one. Giving her the world’s most important intelligence brief was a mistake, but I’m sure the president will now correct it.
In that context, I remember the story of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, whose cantankerous nature had had him shunted to a purely administrative post before the Second World War.
However, after Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt instantly brought King back and gave him the second-highest command in the US Navy. “When the shooting starts,” commented the old warrior, “they send out for the mean sons of bitches.”
In other words, the roar of guns heralds the arrival of able people good at their jobs, and the dismissal of those good only at advancing their careers. If I were a betting man, I’d bet a small fortune on Tulsi being sacked soon. But I’m not, so I won’t.
What I will do is take this rare chance to utter words that don’t often cross my lips: well done, Mr President.