Hugo Lowell: I’m Struggling To Understand The Endgame From The Israelis If They Didn’t Expect The U.S. To Come In
Guardian White House Correspondent Hugo Lowell on ‘The War Room’ to talk about the strategy for Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities:
STEVE BANNON, WAR ROOM PODCAST: The Israelis never had a capability, and you know this from your reporting of the bomb, they never had a capability to militarily bring this to a conclusion if just getting the nuclear program done was inclusion versus regime change. And Frum just, once again, reinforces that, correct? HUGO LOWELL, THE GUARDIAN: Yeah, you know, the only option I have heard being discussed around the White House in terms of what the Israelis could do by themselves remains the same option it has been for decades, which is to basically send in a bunch of attack helicopters, drop in some special force kind of commandos, and then take over and blow up the facility. And that plan or that thinking doesn’t seem to have changed since the first time they came up with it decades ago, when the Fordow site was nowhere near as developed and more kind of even buried further underground than it is currently. And so I’m struggling to understand, like, where the endgame was from the Israelis if they didn’t think the US were going to come in. BANNON: In your reporting, what is the sense of urgency? They had to go last Thursday, and they never had an endgame, because if you don’t take care of that facility, you have not shut down their entire nuclear program, correct? So you must, that must go. Then what was the thinking on the urgency? And now, quite frankly, we’ll answer that first, then we want to get to Jack Posobiec upsell, the upsell on the regime change. LOWELL: I don’t think that’s clear. I mean, apart from maybe trying to have some sort of momentum or trying to press, you know, Trump, like, max pressure into involving the US, because even if the US were to be involved, and let’s just say for the moment that the GBU-57 bombs could penetrate to the bottom of Fordow, the way a strike package like, you know, this would be conducted, you know, there was a lot of reporting yesterday about how Trump had approved or reviewed these attack plans. Those kind of attack plans, what you’re thinking basically is a bunch of F-35s or fighter jets going in and taking out kind of soft targets around the facility. You’ve got to you have to take out any GPS jammers, because the GBU-57 relies on GPS to be guided into whatever chute or kind of entranceway. And then you would have to send B-2s in pairs hours later to or, you know, maybe an hour later, you know, depending on how big the time pocket is, to then bomb the facility. And so it’s like, it’s quite an extended, extensive operation. And by the time those B-2s come in, the Iranians will already know what’s going on. They will know that Fordow is being targeted. And so it’s not a particularly, like, clean operation necessarily, where you just have B-2s kind of stealth come in, drop bombs and then leave. And it’s done really quickly, like, I don’t know, like the Osama bin Laden raid. It’s much more complicated.
