AARON PATRICK: Donald Trump tries to pull off the deal of epoch, Middle East peace

Shortly after midday Saturday, Australian east coast time, some half-a-dozen B-2 Spirit bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force base in western Missouri for a mission that could intensify one of history’s most intractable conflicts or help resolve it.

The bombers’ target was not the uranium Iran’s Islamist regime has been enriching for potential use in a nuclear weapon, but the facilities, equipment and scientists who survived a week-long aerial blitz by Israel, according to Ran Porat, a former Israeli military intelligence analyst who monitored the early stages of Iran’s nuclear program.

The six B-2s that dropped a dozen 14-tonne bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s heavily fortified Fordo nuclear site and the one that bombed the Natanz enrichment plant have probably set the program back at least a year, Dr Porat reckons.

“That’s how it looks now,” he told The Nightly Sunday afternoon. “The Americans don’t know for sure yet. It’s too early to access the damage still under the smoke of war.”

Soon, perhaps within hours, the American and Israeli intelligence services will learn what damage they have wreaked. In addition to satellite and aircraft photography and atmosphere sensors, they will likely have spies who can see where cameras in the sky can’t.

Only then will they know if President Donald Trump’s high-risk gambit to join the war has achieved its immediate objective of preventing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayotallah Ali Khamenei, getting the bomb.

Delivering peace

Like many Israelis, Dr Porat hopes the survivors of the regime, exhausted, demoralised and afraid, will sue for peace.

This is how experts think it could work: the United Nations or another international body supervises the dismantling of what is left of the military nuclear program (Iran has had a civilian nuclear power station since 1967).

An implicit or tacit non-aggression pact with the US and Israel includes the removal of economic sanctions, allowing Iran’s economy to flourish.

Iran stops financing the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, which are dedicated to the destruction of Israel. As tensions settle across the Middle East, other Arab countries, led by Saudi Arabia, normalise diplomatic relations with Israel, leading to trade and cultural exchanges that help foster, eventually, long-term peace.

Here is what some fear will happen: Iran’s religious leaders double down on the nuclear program, and use what physical and human resources they have left to cobble together a nuclear bomb.

Emboldened with possession of a mass killing machine, Iran rebuilds its terror network. American civilians and military personnel across the Middle East become targets. The region becomes even more dangerous for Americans and their allies as Iran and the US engage in tit-for-tat retaliation over years, perhaps decades.

Unpredictable Mr Trump

Predicting with certainty what will happen is impossible. But Mr Trump’s long and often-erratic public career is that of a deal-maker rather than a warmonger.

For this deal — would could be the biggest of his life — Mr Trump is being predictably unpredictable. On Friday morning, Australian time, he give Iran up to two weeks to enter negotiations.

US government sources told the New York Times the B-2 bombers flew 37 hours there and back, hitting Iran at 9am AEST, Sunday. The timing indicates Mr Trump ordered the attack little more than a day after saying he had not decided to bomb Iran.

“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” he said in a recorded message, flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.”

Making your actions difficult to anticipate can be an effective negotiating tactic. So too dropping the world’s most-powerful non-nuclear weapon from Stealth Bombers.

Mr Trump has done both. The world will now take a deep breath and wait for the response from ayatollahs, who have long celebrated the prospect of war with the “Zionist entity” and the “Great Satan”. They now have their wish.