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.

  • limonfiesta@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    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.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
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      13 hours ago

      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.