So who won the ‘12-day war?’

The Trump administration wants the world to know that it is angry about the military intelligence leaks suggesting its big, beautiful bombing of Iran may not have been a total success.

“The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!” said President “Daddy” Trump, from the NATO summit in the Netherlands. Any suggestion to the contrary, he averred, is “an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history.”

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth added that any reports that Iran’s nuclear program had not been destroyed were an affront to “the dignity of our great American pilots.” “The instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country,” he said.

“President Trump has obliterated the Iranian nuclear program,” chipped in Vice President J.D. Vance on social media. “The American media seems destined to obliterate their own credibility on this fake story.”

Back at the White House, meanwhile, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that CNN and the New York Times’s reporting was “flat-out wrong,” adding that the “classified, top secret” intelligence report had been leaked by a “low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

Yet in denying the story so adamantly, the White House has effectively confirmed it.

Hegseth and others are right to stress that the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report was a preliminary and incomplete assessment. But then so did the New York Times. And that’s the point which belies Team Trump’s adamance that Operation Midnight Hammer must be an unqualified triumph. It is simply too soon to pass definitive judgment on the matter.

President Trump may be desperate to claim MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and move on to other matters. No doubt Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have been dented, but Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime is still in power. The notion that any Iranian government, even a future non-theocratic one, will now forever abandon the idea of acquiring a nuclear weapon seems optimistic to the point of delusional. 

Which leads us to another unanswered question: who won what Trump has called “the 12-day war” between Israel, the US and Iran? Tehran is claiming victory, having, in its eyes, seen off the Great and Little Satans (the US and Israel), although its armed forces have been severely weakened and many of its top commanders are dead. Israel also claims to have achieved all military objectives, but Tel Aviv has not yet brought about the regime change it wanted in Iran – and now the Gulf States are denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “reckless” actor who is “destabilizing” the region. As for the US, Trump can talk about having achieved “peace through strength,” yet the consequences of last weekend’s strikes remain unclear.

At home, Team Trump finds itself at loggerheads with its own intelligence services over what, exactly, has happened. Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will brief the senate today on the strikes. But the administration has now decided, in light of the leaks, to limit the amount of classified information it will share with the senators. It is bound to be a contentious meeting. One imagines that famous scene in A Few Good Men. “I want the truth!” shouts Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise). “You can’t handle the truth!” replies Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (Jack Nicholson).

Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who seems completely out of favor, will not be at the briefing, as speculation grows that her current employment will be short-lived. 

Hegseth would surely rather cast himself as Cruise than Nicholson, but he now finds himself in an increasingly awkward position. As an experienced TV host, he performs well in front of the cameras. Trump looked pleased with his rant against the media at the NATO summit yesterday.

As a defense secretary, however, Hegseth continues to raise concerns both inside the administration and out. We’ve already seen an internal investigation into leaks from his department that led to several of his top team being fired and not replaced. Now, his Defense Intelligence Agency has shown highly inconvenient material to the New York Times, of all papers.

Team Trump is often on solid ground when attacking the media for its demented biases. Yet when it seems as if top officials are protesting too much, that’s usually because they are.