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.
The US administration quite explicitly leaked, in the chat discussion between Gabbard, Hegseth, Vance etc while they were bombing Yemen last year, that they wanted to exit the middle east. They complained that they were policing the strait to keep it open, while not getting paid appropriate amounts by the Gulf states and by European beneficiaries of that trade route. Some of the moves the US made with regards to transferring missile tech etc to places like Saudi Arabia, are part of this plan to try and pull back from the gulf – they want those local players to take on the burden of maintaining order.
The US’s goal in this conflict hasn’t been to liberate the Iranian people, nor has it been to establish any sort of order/function in that region of the world. Its broader goal was more likely to trigger the exit of US military assets from that area, or to gain significant financial contributions from gulf states to remain, either would likely be acceptable. Their goals generally align with Russia’s view of the world, in which there are like 4 major powers each controlling a region – with the States controlling all of the western hemisphere (the greater technate of America that Hegseth likes to go on about).
The humiliation of US forces in the gulf, will likely result in the states’ administration invading Cuba next, is my guess. Cuba is less likely to be able to defend against US aggression, and proximity makes logistics much simpler. Plus its distance from Europe and other regional powers, makes Cuba a target they can, and have been, bullying with general silence from the international community. If/when NATO nations are appalled by the actions, that’ll give the administration justification to seize part of Greenland from Denmark – “They clearly aren’t our allies anymore”. That’ll potentially set Canada up to be blockaded similar to how Cuba is currently, forcing Canada to capitulate due to economic isolation.
Just a guess, obviously, but I imagine that’s the sort of ‘plan’ they’re aiming for. The USA is overtly hostile to democratic principles, their administration members have literally published and endorsed books/strategic plans that praise fascists/fascism. They see things like the French revolution as a lesson that the rich should make sure the poor are never able to rise up again, even if it means butchering poor people… “cause that’s what they’d do to us if they could!”. Attempting to parse the USA’s actions based on the ethics/messaging of the “old” USA is misguided. They’ve clearly announced their new motives, the media should be evaluating their ‘war objectives’ based on those new motives, not the US’s motives under past administrations.
Rad.
Shocked Pikachu
This couldn’t possibly have been avoided
It’s almost like things didn’t go as planned or something.
That implies that a plan even existed.
A plan did exist, and it was serving the interest of the American Empire quite well.
Iran was effectively contained and economically suppressed by America and its Epstein class allies in the GCC and Israel.
But that plan was successful in part because of the conflict adverse posture of the Iranian leadership.
So when they were all killed, that plan went poof.
Whoopsie daisy.
Now we have no plan.
You bring up quite a good point that I hadn’t considered or heard yet. Part of the working reason for which Iranians were suppressed in their ability on the world stage was, in fact, because of their leadership. Leadership with a curated history of relations with the US, which made them more reluctant. The US has now killed that leadership, leaving us with a more adversarial version of the former Iran and now it appears they’ll have a larger say in international affairs moving forward. It’s ironic that killing the leadership was seen as an attempt to undermine the regime, when put this way it seems to have achieved the exact opposite. Isn’t that such an astoundingly idiotic overplay of the hand you’re holding.
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.
They’re trying to bring about the end times.
Certainly not one rooted in reality and spanning longer than a couple days.
didn’t they move their operations to hotels and civilian office building?
will bombing them be considered a legitimate target? are they using local population as human shield?
that has already happened. iran has bombed a couple of hotels some us targets were staying in, back when they were still bombing their military bases.
did any journalist point on how they used civilian infrastructure to hide military headquarters, ie, the excuse they used to justify a genocide?
As I recall the NYT admitted that the US had moved troops to office spaces and hotels, but only as a bare statement of fact with no mention that it entails using civilians human shields and is a war crime
yhea, bullshit.
we spent years letting Israel do a genocide because people in the densest city in the world are in the densest city in the world. but it’s ok for the US to hide military infrastructure in civilian hotels, or Israel to put the mossad headquarters in the heart of tel Aviv.
that’s how the rules based international order works. a resistance group building tunnels under a walled-off ghettoized city is “using human shields”, but the most powerful army in the world* putting up troops in hotels to avoid them getting targeted at base, thus making the hotels targets, is just a reasonable tactical move.
*formerly accurate, now in question
Aside from Iran starting to charge a toll and control traffic through Hormuz, this is the other most consequential outcome of the war. All the infrastructure that the US spent decades building is now useless. Iran proved that none of these bases were defensible, and they destroyed billions, if not trillions, worth of radars and other high tech equipment, not to mention the cost of building these bases themselves. The entire US position in the region has now collapsed, and there’s no going back to the way things were before.
that’s not only emboldening their enemies, the bases were part of their protection pitch to their allies too. some petrolstate’s feet will be getting even colder.
i imagine the Gulf states must be rethinking the whole arrangement now. They thought they were untouchable under the American umbrella, but now they see they’re in fact the ones who will be absorbing most of the damage from the war. And if the US can’t protect them, then making peace with Iran is the only way forward.
Those bases were never thought to need defense other than local riots. The thought was that nobody would dare attack them. They were seen as defense by their nature of existing. The defense being the threat of American offense coming a week later to wreak havoc. But if you put a country on their heels, what difference does it make? Might as well go out swinging, and that’s what they did, and it worked.
Absolutely, the whole premise was that nobody would have the audacity to fight the US directly. There is a famous poker saying that you don’t bluff someone who can’t fold. Iran couldn’t fold because their survival as a state depended on it. So Trump’s made the worst possible blunder, trying to bluff against an opponent with no exit and maximum stakes.
