At least a dozen US military sites across the Gulf region have been so badly damaged by Iran’s retaliation to US and Israeli attacks that their presence now creates significantly more vulnerabilities than it does benefits, a slate of Middle East experts argued on Thursday.
The original revelation about the state of the bases was first reported in The New York Times last month, in which they were described as “all but uninhabitable”.
The Trump administration has yet to acknowledge the extent of the damage sustained.
“This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month,” Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, said at the Arab Center Washington DC’s annual conference.
I’ve heard many different explanations for the differences, the simplest being the older generation were more moderate and the younger more hardline.
But I think that’s oversimplifying it.
One of the more compelling explanations I’ve heard from an Irianan academic is the difference in the wars each generation of leaders were forged in.
Basically his explanation states that the older generation were veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, which was the largest conventional war since WW2.
And that was the lens they viewed a potential conflict with America through, purely conventional.
Whereas the new generation were forged in Iraq and Syria, fighting with asymmetrical warfare.
Note that this war, while not quite over, has been waged mostly asymmetrically.
Sure, they used their conventional forces to attack America’s conventional forces, but their primary thrust was exerting asymmetric economic pressure through oil and gas infrastructure and closing off the straight.
I’m looking forward to reading the historical accounts of this conflict in the hopefully not too distant future.