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.
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.