The bunker busters as preemption
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Interviewed in Arabic-language media in November 2025, John Kiriakou offered an explanation for the 2025 American strikes on Iran that he attributed to serving contacts.

The standing pattern

He begins with the pattern he has described many times: that literally every American president who has entertained an Israeli prime minister since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan, has had to deal with a request to bomb Iran, "every single Israeli prime minister that visits Washington says, we want you to bomb Iran. And every American president has said, no, I'm not going to bomb Iran." Until this one.

He also sets out the Israeli side of it as a genuine perception rather than a pretext: the Israelis "really see Iran as an existential threat," and believe Americans do not understand how threatened they feel.

The reason he was given

"My friends inside the White House and in the CIA tell me that the reason why President Trump decided to change that policy and decided to bomb Iran was because this time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Israelis were so sure that the Iranians were planning a nuclear attack on Israel that the Israelis were prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran."

"And President Trump decided to use the bunker buster bombs against the Iranian nuclear site just so that the Israelis would not use nuclear weapons against Iran."

Kiriakou attributes the account to "some friends in the CIA, in the Defense Department, and in the White House" and does not name them.

What it makes the strike

On this reading the American strike was not an endorsement of the Israeli assessment but an attempt to preempt the Israeli response to it, a conventional attack substituted for a nuclear one. It is a considerably less flattering account of the decision than either the administration's or its critics', in that it grants Trump neither conviction nor initiative.

The argument sits alongside Kiriakou's separate view that the intelligence never supported the premise: that Israel has been saying since 1986 that Iran is six months from a bomb, and that the two national intelligence estimates written on the question in the previous twenty years both concluded Iran had no nuclear weapons programme.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Donald Trump
- 2026 Iran war
- Netanyahu's nuclear threat to Trump
