Now to be fair at the very beginning, I have to concede that nearly all–perhaps all–Presidents delay information on something, sometimes. There is no doubt here, Trump is not the first. But he seems to have raised the delay of information and the ability to act as if everything is OK to a higher art than most.

Take Iran–after a long time of discussing and thinking by the administration, the Congress and others during the Israeli-Iranian war, everyone with the slightest bit of interest in the matter knew the US was considering striking Iran to take out their budding–but fortunately not yet complete–nuclear program. We did not know when, of course and did not know for sure it would happen, but it was obviously a possibility.

This was not necessarily a rash or foolish thing to do. Iran’s nuclear program was coming along well, thanks in large part to the First Trump Administration pulling out of the original international Iranian treaty. Nobody sane in the free world(or elsewhere, maybe)wants to see nuclear weapons in the hands of the people who run Iran. But there were obvious risks. There was doubt.

The doubts were resolved for anyone with a TV set late in June. On June 22 a number of B-2’s(apparently now our most capable bombers) took off from Whiteman AFB in MO and started west across the US and then on across the Pacific. This was a clever and apparently successful attempt to confuse the Iranians who thought the US was gong to threaten someone in Asia, perhaps China regarding Taiwan. Several other B-2’s left from the the same AFB and flew east across the US then across the Atlantic and eventually to the Middle East where, after about 18 hours in the air, they attacked Iran’s nuclear weapons development center. Since a lot of this is deep underground it was obvious to military, diplomatic and other observers that they would need MOPS(Massive Ordnance Penetrators)bombs to do the job fully. A lot of the work would be unreachable by old fashioned, regular bombing.

Several of these huge bombs were used, successfully at least to the extent that some of them appear to have gotten underground. The US Air Force(along with some Army and Navy help, apparently)behaved magnificently and all came off as planned. Except that nobody would be certain right away how well it had worked. As nearly as I am able to tell, nobody outside of the higher levels of the government know now. Or maybe they just don’t know a lot more than the rest of us.

The raid was hardly over before President Trump was bragging about its success. The military were a bit less effusive, claiming great destruction of Iranian work on the surface, but hesitant to claim too much about what had been destroyed underground.

Over the month plus since then news sources have differed, mostly along ideological lines, over whether this thing “worked” or not.(“Worked” meaning, Is Iran still capable of having functional nukes with a few years or will it take longer?) Gen Wesley Clark and Gen David Petraeus, two officers of long and difficult command in Mideastern matters, both seemed to be saying it looked good but you’d have to wait for more evidence. A number of other prestigious and knowledgeable people said largely the same thing. Then something odd occurred in that pretty much nothing occurred or has been heard of since. Maybe it’s not odd in that other times in US History such things have happened. But look at how fast this was.

Have you hear anything of this story recently? Did the media follow up on it for more than about two weeks? Did the Administration make any serious attempt to keep the public informed, at least to the extent that their investigators were still trying to figure out what happened to the underground Iranian material? And the answer of course is NO to all of the above, at least to any serious attempt to do explaining of what happened. This story simply fell off cable TV and into oblivion. And we must wonder why. Perhaps we should ask the media and the Administration. I doubt there would be a satisfactory answer but it would be worth a try.

It is now late in the morning of Aug 18. President Zelensky and his European allies/partners should be assembling now for what promises to be an interesting meeting with Trump. Last Friday with Putin appears to have been almost a non-event I could hardly believe they would have a joint-statement reading, but no press conference and then get out of sight, but that’s what happened. So obfuscation seems to be the word of the day.

It will be harder to hides things about today’s conference. There will be, in addition to Trump and Zelensky, at least seven other European leaders, Presidents, Prime Ministers, leaders of important organizations(NATO and the EU). These leaders are going to be keeping an eye on the direction things are going, as well they should. To the extent we know anything about what passed between Trump and Putin, it sounds as if the former was slipping toward a subtle attempt and maybe more, to back Putin’s view, which is, essentially, “Give me everything I want and I’ll leave.” This is not likely to please the Europeans and I imagine some of them will talk fairly soon. At least I hope so.

But there will be backstories and interpretations and maybe several competing understandings about what has happened and what is likely to happen. How long will it be before at least some of this is public knowledge and the citizenry have at least a chance to assess where things are going? I don’t know, but I trust it won’t be too long. Keep your eye on the ball. I agree that not everything about negotiations should be released. But at least a basic understanding should be available and the various publics involved should be able to make reasonable assumptions about what to expect.