‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’
Posted: 26th June 2025
‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’
On Saturday morning, the US launched “Operation Midnight Hammer”, dispatching seven B-2 stealth bombers from Whiteman airbase in Missouri to strike Iran, some 7,000 miles away.
The bombers flew over the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea before entering Iranian airspace at around 11pm and dropping 30,000lb bombs on the Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites.
Over two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles were also launched at the Isfahan nuclear site – located to the south of Tehran – from a US submarine positioned in the region.
US president Donald Trump declared shortly afterwards that “the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated”.
Remarkably, the attack had apparently caught the UK government by surprise.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy had been in the White House on Friday to meet with US secretary of state Marco Rubio, declaring that a “window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution”.
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Earlier in the week, Keir Starmer had also been adamant that the US would not attack Iran after sitting next to Trump at the G7 in Canada. “There’s nothing the President said that suggests he’s about to get involved in this conflict”, he insisted.
Starmer, according to The Times, was informed that the US was going to strike Iran a mere 40 minutes before it happened. Yet despite being put outside of the Washington tent, Starmer was quick to justify the attack, which was by any standards illegal under international law.
In a statement, Starmer declared “Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and the US has taken action to alleviate that threat”. He was flanked by Lammy, who refused several times on the BBC to say whether the airstrikes were illegal.
Iran retaliated on Monday by striking Al Udeid, a sprawling desert airbase in Qatar which serves as a major regional hub for US and British forces. The Iranian government gave advance notice of the attack, reducing the possibility of drawing the US further into the war.
Trump thanked Iran “for giving us early notice”, declaring they had “gotten it all out of their ‘system’”. The White House subsequently brokered a ceasefire between Iran and Israel, with the US president announcing the conflict would henceforth be known as “the 12 Day War”.
But the bombs kept falling in the hours before the ceasefire began, with a visibly furious Trump telling the media that Israel and Iran “have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing”.
The ceasefire nonetheless appears to be holding - and the autopsies on the conflagration are beginning to roll in.
For all the bluster in Washington and Tel Aviv, a leaked US intelligence report has indicated the attacks “did not destroy the core components” of Iran’s nuclear programme “and likely only set it back by months”.
To this end, the incident has likely convinced Tehran of the importance of procuring a nuclear deterrent. “Future Iranian leaders will have drawn the lesson… that the case for a nuclear bomb has now been demonstrated beyond all doubt”, wrote former UK foreign secretary William Hague.
Trump’s decision to pick up the phone and order Israel to stop, meanwhile, has demonstrated how the US government has the power to pull Israel back from the brink in Gaza – yet chooses not to.
And as for Britain, ministers like Starmer and Lammy are again shown to have been humiliated by the US, while they doggedly pursue the so-called ‘special relationship’.
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