‘Midnight Hammer’ Doesn’t Mean Iran Can’t Hurt Us – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Operation Midnight Hammer worked like a deceptive football play. News flashed late Saturday that B2 bombers were going to Guam, just as a squadron of them refueled over the Mediterranean, where the roar of giant  KC-135 air tankers taking off from the U.S. air base of Morón in southern Spain broke the stillness of night in the surrounding countryside.

The B2s vectored in for the rendezvous with KC-135s above the Gulf of Cadiz fly round trips from their home base in Whiteman, Missouri for bombing runs. The U.S. Air Force does not permit prolonged landings or temporary basing of the world’s more sophisticated bomber outside U.S. territory to maintain the secrecy of its highly sensitive stealth technology that allowed the B2s to enter and exit Iranian skies without detection.

Seven B2s dropped fourteen 30,000 pound SBU-57 MOP bunker busting bombs on the main uranium enrichment plants in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan protected by reinforced concrete, hundreds of meters below ground.

It was a “spectacular military success,” according to president Donald Trump who said that Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “completely and totally obliterated” and called for the Ayatollahs to return to negotiations. B2 missions decisively ended the bloody Balkans conflict in the 1990s. Flying the same trajectory over Spain, they took out the Serbian military’s main underground fuel and ammunitions depos, forcing peace terms on its genocidal leaders.

But such immediate results are unlikely to be produced by Midnight Hammer. Experts differ on whether the destruction of Iran’s nuclear sites was as complete as Trump claims and Iran’s response capacity, however much degraded following days of Israeli air strikes, remains threatening both in kinetic and asymmetrical terms.

Serbia’s ruling thugs did not have ballistic missiles and their power base was highly localized. Iran’s mullahs have supplies of domestically produced sophisticated missiles and drones and an international support network woven into growing Muslim communities around the world in which terrorist cells are metastasing.

While Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon, Gaza, and in Yemen have taken severe beatings from the Israelis in recent months, sleeper cells are active throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and in the U.S. according to former FBI and CIA intelligence analysts interviewed on various news channels.

Serbia’s ruling goons also lacked the terrorist zeal of Iran’s fanatical mullahs and their highly indoctrinated military caste in the IRGC. Faith in martyrdom and self-immolation runs deep in their groupthink and religious conditioning and they will rely on fear and panic as a main weapon until their last breath.

Despite Israel’s claims of eliminating the IRGC high command as well as “replacements and the replacements of the replacements,” according to Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran’s regime remains far from dead. Islamic terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda have remained active despite repeated decapitations of its leadership and destruction of its operating bases during more than two decades.

Israel may have complete dominance over Iranian skies, having totally neutralized Iran’s 1970s vintage air force and air defenses consisting mostly of outdated Russian S-200 SAM systems. Although a good part of Iran’s highly perfected hypersonic missiles may have been used up in daily barrages against Israel and many more destroyed by air strikes, the mullahs retained the capacity to deliver a devastating response to the weekend strikes on its nuclear facilities. The IRGC unleashed its most potent Khoramshar-4 missiles with 3,300 pound warheads, kept in reserve until now, destroying entire city blocks and a biological warfare research center in Tel Aviv.

It’s calculated that about half of Iran’s missile launchers have been taken out but estimates vary. Israeli defense spokesmen were saying some days ago that 40 percent were destroyed while some officers claimed they had hit two thirds. The official calculations may include fixed launchers. Mobile launchers are far more difficult to target, proving elusive in past wars.

During the 1990 Gulf War in which the U.S. led coalition had complete air dominance over Iraq as well as special forces hunting for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles on the ground, very few were neutralized. Iraq’s Scud launchers kept firing until hours before the armistice, when a missile hit a U.S. army outpost, killing over 20 Americans.

A couple of hits like that on the target rich environment of U.S. bases in the Middle East would be bad television for Trump, triggering hysterical responses from Democrats and some of his own supporters fearing his entry into a new “forever war.” But the Iranians may not choose that route for the moment as it  could justify more B2 raids which its military would have difficulty withstanding without material support from Russia and China. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is flying to Moscow to meet with Putin on Monday after the deputy chairman of his security council, Dmitri Medvedev, said that “a number of countries are ready to supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”

An Iranian diplomat in Europe said last week that if America “fired one bullet into Iran” they would retaliate against U.S. military bases. But Iran’s response is likely to remain focused, at least for the moment, on hammering Israel, whose civilian population the Mullahs see as hostages.

Closing the straits of Hormuz is a long expected Iranian response to a U.S. attack. Iran’s parliament voted for it on Sunday. But Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s National Ruling Council has not yet made the decision and Araghchi seemed to forestall the possibility at a press conference in Istanbul Sunday, saying that “All options are on the table” when asked by reporters.

A reinforced U.S. naval presence around the strait with last weekend’s arrival of the USS Nimitz task force complicates any attempt to mine the waterway. Iran could fire missiles on shipping as their Houthi surrogates have done on Red Sea approaches to the Suez Canal, but that would trigger a massive U.S. and regional response. Furthermore the country most affected would be China, Iran’s ally and main export market, whose weakening economy depends on Middle Eastern oil.

The clandestine activation of terrorist operations within the U.S., Europe, or other third countries is an ultimate option for the Mullahs. Iranian officials claim that Midnight Hammer achieved little because all the enriched uranium had been moved out from the targeted facilities. This seems highly unlikely but it’s possible if not probable that small amounts of weapons grade uranium could have been transferred to secret locations, possibly outside Iran, to make “dirty bombs” for delivery by terrorist groups.

Iranian agents should have no difficulty organizing cells among the millions of radicalized Muslim migrants in Europe or recruiting foot soldiers among the 14 million undocumented aliens allowed into the U.S. under the past Democrat administration and now protected in sanctuary cities run by far left mayors. A dirty bomb is non-lethal but the release of concentrated radiation by an explosive device in the center of Paris or New York would cause mass panic.

It’s difficult to accept, but the U.S. is surrounded by enemy states. Venezuela is an Iranian “base of operations,” according to the senior research professor on Latin America at the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Evan Ellis. Venezuelan passports and travel documents have been issued to possibly thousands of Hezbollah operatives by its communist regime with close ties to Mexican drug cartels, according to U.S. intelligence reports and defecting Venezuelan security officials interviewed by The American Spectator.

A former head of Venezuela’s SEBIN says a Venezuelan air force general who became ambassador to Tehran, negotiated the installation of assembly plants for Iranian strike drones in Venezuela where clandestine IRGC flights have been landing secret cargo and personnel for years to develop a capability for human stealth bombers.

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