Afrasianet - Ibrahim Alloush - Has Iran abandoned its nuclear and missile programs and accepted their dismantling under Western (i.e., Zionist) tutelage?  Did you raise the white flag?  Have you surrendered to the will of the American-Zionist side politically? 

The controversy erupted, in the West, over the extent of the damage to the Iranian nuclear program, even before Trump announced an official ceasefire on the morning of 24/6/2025.  That controversy escalated further after the ceasefire, for two fundamental and interrelated reasons:

1 – The amount of damage to that program determines the time horizon required to rebuild and activate it, and whether that horizon is only a few months, or long years, or if the Iranian nuclear program has been completely and completely eliminated, as both Trump and Netanyahu claim.

2 – This, in turn, determines the effectiveness of the US-Zionist campaign to directly target Iran, and thus the wisdom of divesting that campaign politically, and thus extended the ability of both Trump and Netanyahu to make fateful decisions as rulers who face, internally, real questioning of their personality and approach to governance.

In this context, the Zionists' support for the recent attack on Iran was overwhelming.  According to an opinion poll quoted by the Times of Israel newspaper on 19/6/2025, 82% of Israeli Jews, across party lines and political currents, supported launching strikes on Iran, while the timing of those strikes, on 13/6/2025, without prior American commitment to participate in them, supported 69% of Israeli Jews.

There is no doubt, then, that the campaign of the Zionist enemy improved the chances of the Netanyahu government politically inside Israel, and gave Netanyahu a strong boost of support, so that Yair Lapid, the first opponent of it, rushed to support it strongly.

This included his support for it before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament, "despite Netanyahu being a bitter political rival," as he said in his testimony before the committee via videoconference, according to "The Jewish Chronicle" on 24/6/2025.

A YouGov poll on 23/6/2025, after the so-called "Operation Midnight Hammer" launched by the United States on Iran, indicated that 85% of American adults oppose the United States entering into a war with Iran, and only 5% support entering it.    

According to YouGov itself, a previous poll of the United States' direct involvement in that war on 22/6/2025, and subsequent to the start of the Zionist aggression against Iran on 13/6/2025, indicated that 53% of Trump's supporters believe that "the United States should not get involved in the Iranian-Israeli conflict", while the percentage of those who opposed the American intervention among Americans in general reached 60%, in addition to 24% who do not know, and 16% who support.  

If these statistics, published on 17/6/2025, are correct, this means that those opposed to a war with Iran in the United States of America increased their percentage immediately after the latter's entry into it.  

Western media reports, such as the New York Times on 13/6/2025, or the British Independent on 17/6/2025, regardless of the accuracy of those polls, spoke of sharp divisions among senior Republicans over the direct involvement of the United States in the war. 

 
A senior Republican Party, Rich Paris, warned Trump directly, on his page on the "X" platform, on 17/6/2025, that the Republican Party would lose its majority in Congress for a decade, if the trigger was pressed.

Therefore, Trump had to come out of the theater at lightning speed, for his internal calculations in America, after he entered it through the wide door in support of the Zionist entity, and to show his entry as if he had decided the battle completely and definitively, without violating his electoral promises not to involve his country in prolonged, costly and absurd foreign wars, as he kept repeating.

So too, it was logical that Trump would go crazy when American media, such as CNN and the New York Times, circulated reports, based on a "preliminary" assessment of the Pentagon's Military Intelligence Agency (DIA), questioning his "great achievement" and saying that the damage to Iran's nuclear facilities targeted by "Operation Midnight Hammer": Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan could be fixed in a month or two in one case, or a few months at most, contrary to Trump's claim of the operation's effectiveness.

Despite Trump's screams that what has been circulated is "fake news," the CIA report is real.  

What actually happened was that the report was put on the  CAPNET network for private communication between the White House and Congress, titled "Top Secret," on Monday evening.   

On Tuesday afternoon, parts of the Military Intelligence Agency report found their way to some US media, without mentioning the source, while CNN and the New York Times sought to arouse Trump's paranoia by extracting "3 sources" in military intelligence who claimed to have captured private information to them!

This came in the context of a fierce political struggle between the Trump movement and the deep state.  There are reports, as stated in the "New Republic" website, on 25/6/2025, that the Trump administration will reduce the sharing of private information with Congress from now on as a result of this leak, which will complicate Trump's relationship with lawmakers, especially since the strikes on Iran were launched without authorization from Congress, and in light of the opposition of some Republican representatives to them, knowing that a historical conflict broke out over the authority of American presidents to wage wars without authorization from Congress.  

On Wednesday, the Trump administration officially adopted the narrative of the Israel Atomic Energy Authority, in the front of the White House website on 25/6/2025, that US-Israeli strikes on Iran have impeded its ability "to develop nuclear weapons for many years.  The achievement could continue indefinitely if Iran does not have access to nuclear material." 

The other fact, other than the military intelligence agency's report, is that no one yet knows the exact extent of the damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps even the Iranians themselves, despite Trump's claims that "all" of Iran's nuclear facilities have been "wiped out" from existence.  

But that same provocative statement, reposted on the White House website, may have been calculated to get the Iranians to reveal how much was not "erased" in response to Trump's provocation.   

Serious Western websites are currently assessing the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear program, looking for the smallest piece of information about what is left.  Therefore, let us be aware that delving into these details, and trying to highlight their merits, to show the ineffectiveness of the American-Zionist strikes, is not necessarily prudent.  

Let's note what was referred to, for example, by an important and lengthy report in the American magazine "Foreign Affairs", on 26/6/2025, under the title "Did the attacks on Iran succeed?" , that Iran now has the opportunity to transfer some equipment and materials, which were under IAEA control, to its nuclear reconstruction program, claiming that they were completely destroyed in the attacks.

See also the detailed report, attached to satellite imagery (before and after), published by the US National Public Radio website  NPR, on 26/6/2025, under the title "Destroyed, damaged, or inoperable? 

What we know about Iran's nuclear facilities," which raises with concern, in conclusion, the issue of 400 kilograms of enriched uranium whose location is now unknown, and the possibility of other undeclared underground backup sites where Iran's nuclear program could be monitored.

The central link of the battle, then, will now shift to the security penetration front, which proved to be very large during the Zionist-American aggression against Iran, and unfortunately played a central role as a lever for it.  But now, after aggression, it will become more important and central, to achieve two interrelated purposes:

(a) Knowing the remaining components of Iran's nuclear (and ballistic ballistic program), both quantitatively and qualitatively.

(b) Knowing when, where, how, at what pace, and what experiences it will be rebuilt. 

Hence, the shadow war will be the most important form in the next phase in which the collective West focuses on knowing what has been achieved in the aggression, what has not been achieved, and therefore when, in what locations, with what momentum and with the help of those who will renew it, so that the goals and plans of the next aggression against Iran are set.

Therefore, the Foreign Affairs report, for example, insists on the absolute necessity of returning Iran under IAEA monitoring, given the importance of the information it has been publicly disseminating to Western intelligence services in assessing the progress of Iran's nuclear program. What about information that you weren't making public?!

The NPR report also asserts that the only way to stop Iran's nuclear program is to place Iran under an agreement under which it is subject to strict and continuous monitoring with its consent.   

It is obvious that the International Atomic Energy Agency was one of the tools of the war on Iran, security, as a tool of espionage, not only politically, when it gave the pretext for aggression in the resolution issued by its Board of Governors, on 12/6/2025, that Iran has become in violation of its nuclear obligations, just one day before the Zionist aggression against Iran.  

It is therefore self-evident that the Iranian parliament will take a decision to stop cooperating with the agency.  Indeed, since Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, to support for Zionist aggression against Iran at the heart of what is supposed to be a negotiating process, to direct US strikes to complete the Zionist aggression, confirms the correctness of North Korea's approach: to get rid of international control and move forward, not only with uranium enrichment, but in building nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences.

North Koreans say they have learned a lot from the lesson of Iraq, which was attacked after undergoing a program to dismantle its long-range weapons and missiles.

  The lesson of North Korea is this: a state armed with weapons of mass destruction that the West does not dare to attack.  The lesson of the experience of Iraq and Libya (and Palestine) is that the West uses the negotiating approach as a cover for aggression.

Finally, many are embroiled in a futile debate over who will win the twelve-day battle between Iran on the one hand and the American-Zionist side on the other.  

Apart from what the Zionist enemy army claimed about achieving all the objectives of aggression against Iran, the destruction of the Arak heavy water reactor, which produces plutonium, the enrichment facility at Natanz, the uranium conversion site in Isfahan, and dozens of other sites related to Iran's nuclear program... The U.S. aggression completed the mission at Fordow and elsewhere. 

Apart from the Zionist enemy's claims of destroying 50% of Iran's missile launchers, hundreds of ballistic missiles, destroying more than 30 missile production facilities through Iran, 80% of Iran's air defense systems, intercepting 90% of the 530 missiles launched by Iran during the battle, and 99% of more than 1,100 Iranian drones... 

Apart from the Zionist enemy's bravado that it has liquidated more than 30 high-ranking military commanders and 11 Iranian nuclear scientists...

Far from Netanyahu's bravado about achieving a "historic victory" over Iran, and pushing back two "imminent existential dangers," nuclear and ballistic missiles...

Even apart from the real Iranian military achievements in this battle, including, but not limited to, according to  the "Military Watch Magazine" website on 27/6/2025, the success in targeting the headquarters of the "Rafael" military company, the "Nuclear Research Center" in "Tel Aviv", and "Al-Kiriyah", which is the Pentagon equivalent in the Zionist entity, the headquarters of the Mossad, and the "Ovda" base. The Air Force, the Nevatim Air Base, the Weizmann Institute of Science and Technology, the Haifa Port, the Haifa Oil Refinery, Ben Gurion Airport, strategic industrial facilities in Kiryat Gat, and what do you know about Kiryat Gat, where there are dozens of factories, including the most important light weapons factories, and most importantly, Intel's high-end semiconductor factories (7 nano-millimeter wide), and others...

I say, far from the allegations and facts, and from the declarations of overwhelming and final victory by Netanyahu or Trump, or even on the side of the axis of resistance and its supporters, some forget that this is a battle within a series of battles, and it was not the first, and it will certainly not be the last, but it is the culmination of an escalating path in the direct clash between Tehran and Tel Aviv.

It is a link in a chain, neither the end, nor its beginning, a war that did not start on 13/6/2025, and did not end on 24/6/2025, and therefore the identity of the victor and the defeated is not yet determined.  

However, we can say that when the balance of power, militarily and technologically, is clearly tilted with the American-Zionist side, and when that party is capable of committing heinous massacres and mass destruction, the resistance wins as long as it does not stop, and the enemy is defeated as long as it is unable to subdue the resistance, from Iran to Gaza.

Has Iran abandoned its nuclear and missile programs and accepted their dismantling under Western (i.e., Zionist) tutelage?  Did you raise the white flag?  Have you surrendered to the will of the American-Zionist side politically? Have you abandoned the resistance approach?  Did Trump succeed in forcing the unconditional surrender that Iran demanded?

Has the resistance in Gaza stopped?  Has the enemy been able to cultivate its destructive capabilities in the form of a political victory?  Or does a ceasefire without the resistance surrender to enemy conditions mean its tactical victory?

That is the measure in the short term.  

Those who sit in the seats of spectators, clapping or indignant, waiting for the battle to result in the liberation of Jerusalem now, and not tomorrow, without raising a finger, except to change the channel they watch on television or their mobile phone, may watch a sports match or a movie.

This is a historic battle, a generational struggle, and the achievement of a historic victory in it remains subject to the mobilization of the collective forces of the nation to resolve the battle historically.  Until that condition is met, the accumulation of small victories is the continuation of the resistance itself, and the continuation of its project.