Reading through the official discussion about the one-page memorandum of understanding with Iran, the focus on Iran ending enrichment and handing over the enriched material makes it clear that the nuclear program was not "obliterated," in the way the president and Secretary of Defense used that term. In June 2025, for example, Secretary Pete Hegseth stated: "Based on everything we have seen—and I've seen it all—our bombing campaign obliterated Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons." While it is possible to say that the large-scale ability to make bombs was obliterated, the knowledge and the uranium appear not to have been bombable, and therefore things were more provisional than the president’s characterization, which conveyed the idea that Iran had been bombed back to the glass beads and abacus stage. The administration marketed the attacks as a "Total Kitchen Closure" for health violations. In reality, the building was demolished, but the chefs saved the starter dough and the recipes, and they are currently sitting in the basement waiting for the inspectors to leave so they can start a "pop-up" shop.

I should add, that when the Times reported that the June attack had not obliterated the nuclear capability, the administration attacked the paper. Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which authored the assessment that said the program had only been paused was fired. All that turned out to be true and is the basis for the negotiations going on now.

In war, an administration has the facts and it is hard for even an awake congressional majority or the press to get at what's really going on. The public is more reliant on a president and his team than on any other issue — whether Iran can build a bomb, whether the war was necessary, whether the people who died were given an honest reason for the dying. And when the officials who contradict the president's marketing pitch are fired for doing so, that dependence deepens, but it also becomes more skewed.