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 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.
They still need the american weapons, the gulf states have barely any popular support and would get overthrown in a heatbeat without american support.