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Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who was a key player in the George W Bush administration during the War on Terror, has praised President Donald Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear targets in support of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion offensive.
Speaking on Fox News’s Special Report on Thursday, Rice applauded the actions of the U.S. and Israeli military and told anchor Bret Baier: “We will eventually know precisely how much the Iranian program was damaged, but I think all of the evidence is that it was substantially, significantly damaged to the place that, for a while at least, it will be hard to build a nuclear weapon.”
She said the strikes would provide a “shot in the arm for American credibility” on the global stage following the “disastrous” presidency of Joe Biden.
“Credibility is not something that you establish one day and then you sort of dial it in and say it’s done,” Rice said.
“We have to keep establishing that the United States is going to try and shape the international system, not just be a victim of it. But what’s happened in the last couple of days is very, very good for American credibility.”
While Trump would normally be expected to welcome such a glowing endorsement, the Bush administration’s legacy of dragging the U.S. military into long-term regime change commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to 9/11 is not remembered favorably by Trump’s MAGA base.
Trump ran for the White House on the promise that there would be no more unpopular interventionist “forever wars,” and the phrase “neocon” to describe Bush-era Republicans is frequently thrown about as a pejorative by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Carlson, Bannon, and Greene were all opposed to Trump’s decision to drop 12 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan and cheered his announcement of a ceasefire.
The president’s refusal to make the case or provide evidence that Iran was ramping up its ambitions to build a nuclear bomb prior to Saturday’s attack has also been likened by critics to the Bush administration claiming that Saddam Hussein had a weapon of mass destruction, the basis for its invasion of Iraq in 2003, which turned out to be incorrect.
As Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continue to rebuke The New York Times and CNN for reporting on a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that found the damage done to Iran’s facilities was not as severe as they had indicated, Rice supported the administration’s position.
She told Baier she believed Iran’s ambitions to become a nuclear power had received a significant setback and called the leak of the DIA assessment “irresponsible.”
“When you look at what the Israelis were able to do to Hezbollah, what they were able to do to Hamas – the significant efforts against the Iranian military establishment, against scientists. This really is a now-crippled Iran, and a crippled Iran is good for the region.”
Rice was dismissive about the value of engaging in further talks with the Iranians, telling Baier: “We’ve had 46 years of the Iranians destabilizing the region, killing Americans.
“We’ve had 46 years of their proxies holding terror against Israel, against Iraq, against the people of the Middle East. So, no, they don’t want peace.”
