According to an upcoming book by New York Times chief Washington correspondent, David Sanger, it was Obama who ordered the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program.
This isn’t really a surprise, since most people believed the US to be behind the attack, but it does continue Obama’s M.O. of preferring special forces over direct and prolonged engagements.
If true, the real motivation for the attack was to prevent further escalation of a conflict. Had the virus not been discovered, perhaps the belief was that Iran would have assumed that the failures were accidental or that the virus wasn’t targeted. After all, the world had never seen such a directed cyber attack before.
