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.
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.
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.
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.
