'Very good for US credibility': Ex-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice on Iran strikes

The strikes by the US on Iranian nuclear facilities have "bolstered America's credibility on the global stage," according to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice."Credibility is not something that you establish one day and then you sort of dial it in and say it's done. 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," she told Fox News' Bret Baier on Thursday, five days after the US targeted Iran's Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan sites amid the conflict between America's ally Israel and Iran, their common rival.The conflict, which began on June 13 with the Israeli attack on nuclear and military infrastructure in Iran, ended a day after the American operation through a truce brokered by President Donald Trump.Meanwhile Rice, who was the United States' top diplomat in the administration of Trump's fellow Republican George W Bush, also offered her own assessment of the impact of the operation, dubbed Midnight Hammer."We will eventually know precisely how much their nuclear 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" Rice, now a Stanford University professor, stated.Further, she criticized the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) leaked, "low-confidence" preliminary intelligence assessment, which claimed that the strikes did not destroy key components of the targets.Rice described DIA's preliminary assessment as "irresponsible."Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly asserted that the operation "completely obliterated" the targeted Iranian nuclear sites.