Iran strikes threaten future of US bases, with Jon Elmer

You are watching and listening to the electronic. I am John Elmer. This is the resistance report on day 156 of Israel's genocide in Gaza. Day 181 of Israel and the US's uh war of aggression on Iran. We are approaching the sixmonth uh mark since that war began on February 28th. We're going to look at the future of US bases in the region shortly. Um but let's start with the straight of Hormuz which is where the war is currently the primary vector at the moment. Um we are looking here at this uh beautiful satellite uh photograph from the International Space Station showing the Persian Gulf. Um all of the 20% of the world's oil uh 20% of the world's natural gas come out of what you're seeing in that map. And of course, all the way across the top there is Iran uh flexing its geography, something that um Iran said that they were going to do before the war began. Um they have flexed their military capacity, but they also are wielding the geography that is in their favor. In this case, the US Treasury launched uh earlier this week Operation Economic Outcast, which it called an unprecedented campaign of sanctions, which will uh somehow be bigger than the sanctions that were always said or the maximum pressure, the biggest sanctions ever. Anyways, more bluster. Um they described it as economic D-Day. Um which it doesn't have any [clears throat] uh semblance whatsoever of D-Day. So, it's just classic Trump administration foolishness. The Financial Times rightly pointed it out that that was just a warning, which uh D-Day was not. Um, but in any case, 90% of Iran's oil trade is with China, and China doesn't care about the US bluster. The principal reason the energy shock has not yet uh led to a total global recession, as predicted by the World Bank um and a full-blown crisis is because of China. Uh essentially China cut its imports nearly in half. And even the Treasury Secretary himself at the end of this announcement of this operation economic outcast campaign was asked a question about China. And he he the secretary um the Treasury Secretary answered that um that actually going through with the plan would quote blow up the global financial system because the US is not going to sanction China. For China's part, their Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday, "China is firmly against sanctions that have no basis in international law or UN Security Council mandates, economic warfare, and maximum pressure provide no solution. They are only to fuel tensions, disrupt global economic and financial order, and hurt everyone's interests. Dialogue and negotiation is the only way forward. China's cooperation with Iran complies with international law. We are closely following the situation and will do everything necessary to protect China's rights and interests. So that's not going to go anywhere. Um but uh let's take a look at the next map here. Again, we'll get from space. These uh provide these pictures are a thousand words. Um this is another photograph. Actually, these are photographs from 35mm cameras on the space station from the uh astronauts themselves. I've told you that a couple times before, but it's an interesting note about what you're looking at there. There you're looking at the straight of Hormuz. And for people listening on the radio, the Straight of Hormuz uh separates the two large bodies of water, the Persian Gulf with the oil facilities uh and comes into this tiny choke point that's less than 30 miles wide, is apparently mined uh and has multiple routes through it. uh lead Iranian negotiator um Muhammad Bagar Galibbuff he said on Monday to this uh economic D-Day he said Americans know that no one buys their bombass the United States is not in an economic position to further restriction uh to further restrict its relations with other countries Iran's trading partners both in the media and through message directly to us have made it clear that they don't take these statements into account in any way and the IRGC has said over and over and over again that we will reopen in the straight of Hormuz only when the United States returns to the memorandum of understanding and meets all of Iran's conditions. Some of those conditions are lifting the sanctions, freeing up uh frozen uh Iranian funds like effectively stolen Iranian funds um to end the blockade, to end the war on all the fronts including Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. Um and so that is uh status quo of uh their position on this and they're not changing this position. Anyone who could who uh talks about negotiations with Iranians uh they're always outmatched. The whoever's negotiating with the Iranians are outmatched intellectually uh portfolio-wise, detail-wise, grasp of the um negotiations. And that's why the negotiations don't go anywhere and why we only have um a memorandum of understanding that's like 700 words long and written in all capital letters so that Trump could read it. Anything longer than that and there's no purpose. But you're trying to negotiate nuclear agreements and uh global agreements that include a dozen countries in the Persian Gulf. If you're not willing to actually sit down and have serious negotiators that are skilled and trained and understand their portfolio, none of this is going to go anywhere. Um, and as it is, if it goes nowhere, Iran wins the war. Iran is winning the war as it is right now. The United States cannot do anything. That is why the war did not continue. They don't have the supplies as we've gone over in previous shows. So, um, they're really boxed in right now and flailing. And I think we've seen that week after week. Let's look at the map number three here because this shows you uh in these we're looking at um looking up north from through the straight of Hormuz. And you can see the UAE's multiple oil refineries. Those are the square blocks. Qatar's oil uh refineries. Bahrain you can see along the Iraqi coast and Kuwait. And then on the right you can see the significant military advantage that Iran has in the straight of Hormuz. The situation in the straight of Hormuz is not going to change by some kind of uh US escort. They do not have this the resources to do that. We've tracked that on this program for 6 months. Um that they don't have that ability. Anytime you hear about an escort through the straight of Hormuz, you're talking about a hotline that the ships can call and you might get overwatch by Apache helicopters uh over top of your ships, which um yeah is more um presence patrol than it is uh effective military tactic. Um let's look at number four. This is again another one that's worth a thousand words. I've shown you in this one before, but when we're talking about the straight of Hormuz, uh, we have to look at the coast of Iran. The Iranian mainland has every single military advantage you could want over the straight of Hormuz. The Gulf countries, the Persian Gulf countries around it. They have none of those advantages. Um, and we we will see [clears throat] that in uh in coming up. We'll see more of that. But I just want to say quote from the IRGC spokesperson about the straight of Hormuz. He said reopening the straight of Hormuz is subject to the mechanism and specific circumstances of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has nothing to do with the negotiations between Iran and Oman. Uh this is me now. The Iran Oman negotiations are to figure out the routes uh through the straight of Hormuz and there's some talks uh based on their recent negotiations that there'll be one channel through Iran and one channel through uh Oman but that that both territorial waters would be crossed uh in this and again has nothing to do with sentcom has nothing to do with the United States that according to the memorandum of understanding that's very clear. Uh the IRGC spokesman goes on to say, "For us, the straight of Hormuz is not merely an economic waterway, but rather one of the elements of geographic and strategic power. Opening the straight of Hormuz is contingent upon America's full acceptance of Iran's conditions and its abandonment of interference in the course of regional negotiations. Uh whenever America accepts Iran's conditions, the straight of Hormuz will certainly be open. So the ball's in the Americans court as always. Um this is something that they have to essentially surrender. Uh the thing that they've asked the Iranians to do and the Iranians will never do um is basically the thing that the Americans have to do. They have to just turn tail um because there's no military solution to this conflict right now. Let's take a look at number five. You can see the territorial waters that I was speaking of just a moment ago and you can see where the original uh lines were, the ones in the center off the tip of Oman there. Those were the original transit uh separation scheme. Uh the northern route now through solely through Iranian uh virtually solely through Iranian waters. But you can see on this map how the over there's an overlap in regional uh in which country's waterway um which country's water it goes through. And so anytime um any system is going to involve both Iran and Oman for sure. Uh but here you could see again the way that this is managed. Memorandum of understanding number five makes it perfectly clear that this is up to Oman and Iran to negotiate and Iran wants to open the strait as well too. So they are simply uh in a position where if the Americans uh what they signed on to in Versailles of all places um needs to be followed. But of course, you can't trust the American administration to do anything. Even a signed signature in his dumb Sharpie um doesn't get you um doesn't get you anything because they just scrap those things the next day. Um as we know here in Canada as well. Um let's look at number six here. This is the uh traffic through the straight. This is on Monday. We're watching a time lapse of it go through and you can see the concentrations of ships that are uh collecting off the shores um uh off the shores of the UAE and Oman on either side. Um they can't leave, they can't enter. And maybe we'll show can we show it one more time tomorrow? They can't leave and enter. But also we're seeing trickery in here with the uh AIS system, the identification system that the ships use. So I'm not going to get into daybyday numbers. There's a lot of uh economic um and oil market people debating how many are actually getting through because of the dark fleet ships that are getting through because the American route um they turn their AIS off during that so it has to be calculated after the fact and Iran goes dark through there too and we're not clear if they're adding or not Iran's flow but that just gives you an idea of what it looks like um at any day this week. not very much happening for something that is uh 20% of the world's uh oil and 20% of the world's natural gas flow through there and the crisis um that the world is teetering on. Let's look at the next uh slide here because you can see these are the reports from the UK Navy through the UK Maritime uh transportation organization that follows ship tracking. Um [snorts] and you can see a vessel was struck here. This is one of um around 18 vessels that have been had warning shots fired at them. The vessels aren't intended to be sunk and you can see that in the report here, the master of the oil tanker reports the vessels been struck by an unknown projectile causing damage to the engine room and disabling the vessel. They're not trying to blow up the vessel. Um they're disabling them. And the number is um it's there's two more. This was on Monday. There's reports of two more on Tuesday and Wednesday that happened. And that would take the number to about 20 uh vessels that Iran has tangled with in the strait for violating um the very clear rules in the straight. Let's look at the next line because you can see what this has done uh to the oil markets. Um so this is Lloyd's List Intelligence. Lloyd's list is underwriters. Um they're the insurance marketplace for the shipping uh industry. And the major reason why ships aren't traveling isn't because they're being sunk. It's because of war risk insurance. The premiums have gone up and made it too expensive. And if you don't have war risk insurance, you can't go into port. If you're not insured, you can't go into port. So that previous visual that I showed you with all the ships stacking up on either side, they're not in port. Um because they're not at this point insured and uh are looking to get insured. And this gives you rather than debate the daybyday numbers that come through which really isn't my wheelhouse. Um I just want to show you these as the um six month uh over to look over the six months what was upwards of 150 transit a day down to uh often touching the zero line throughout. And this is a um a shock in the market that the World Bank said would uh inevitably lead to a global recession. Um and so Lloyd's List is an interesting um place to choose because they're the most uh risk uh the most willing to take on risk and this marketplace that um Lloyds of London um has. They're not the insurance company themselves. They're the market where the insurers go in and they can share risk and whatnot. And these this is their um this is their numbers. So it gives you a good idea of what they're working with uh in this situation. Um could do we have 7B? Uh okay this this is directions um a vessel traffic by direction. And this is another key piece to this because um it's the number of tankers that go in is just as important as the number of tankers that go out. Obviously, you're trying to uh have tankers go in and out and load and unload. And so, um the fact that we've seen spikes of transits that get then registered as a transit um you can see that spike around uh January of the week of January 25th. That's when theou was signed and Iran said that there was a 60-day um free pass to cross the straight of Hormuz. So you see that spike of outbound ships, eastbound ships out of the straight of Hormuz because they had been trapped in the straight of Hormuz, but you don't see any uh you see a few of those spikes, but you don't see any of those spikes uh exiting. Um and so some of these numbers um you know when you break them down in uh more granularly you see how numbers could be inflated and the markets can be quelled verbally or with bombast or with uh fake stories that we've been watching for 6 months. Uh Trump's, you know, regime makes billions of dollars off of these kind of statements uh selling before the statement is made in whichever particular case. Usually they come Sunday before Asian markets open. Um and this dance has actually worked to some degree um to keeping the markets um uh from from panicking from allout panic. But again, I think this is just something that's being kicked down the road. Um [snorts] yeah, here we go. So this is the look of um the end of oil out of the Persian Gulf. As you can see, what we're looking at is a line graph that shows the 20 million uh barrels of oil that normally pass through the straight of Hormuz. You can see these three top lines around 18 million. Um that is the uh 24 uh the year 2024, the year 2025, and the dotted line is the 10-year average. So it's it's set it's been consistent through the straight through all the wars through all the crises um that it's been uh it flow through the straight of Hormuz has been there. This time it is not and you can see with that clear blue line for 2026 that just craters. Um and whether the accuracy of the exact number of barrels on those uh even that small number of barrels is accurate is unclear. Um but that would be what you would call the best case scenario uh under these circumstances. Um so quo nine. Yeah. Vessel types. Perfect. Nice. Um so this is the different types of vessels as well because there's 150 um vessel crossings a day. They're not all um they're not crude they're not all crude carriers or um liquid natural gas carriers. There's container ships and bulk carriers, general cargo. And then there's all the chemical tankers. That's something that we haven't really spent enough time talking about, but the precursors and the prochemical products and the fertilizers um all uh you can see they're so small on this line graph that you can't make them out in most cases after February 28th when the war begins. Um and now these map these line graphs are stretching out into um you know they're talking about 2027 that that that's um you know where we're going to be still uh wrestling with this situation. And as I've pointed out before the basic rubric for uh understanding how long things will be backed up is for each day it will take a week uh to fix in the global economy. So, we're now six uh months into this war uh worth of days. So, you can count how many weeks. We're now talking years to fix this. Um and it's a crisis that will inevitably um affect everybody in the world unless the US steps down from this. Um, the American Automobile Association said gas is up 30%, diesel is up 50%, jet f jet fuel is up 70%, as people listening to this show who drive or fly obviously know and don't need to be told. Um, diesel prices went north of $100 a barrel for the first time ever this week. Um and um this is the recession that is being kicked down the road and Trump signed and the draw down of the strategic petroleum reserves are happening to uh critical rates that um haven't been seen in three generations. Um these ways of trying to prevent the disaster are all starting to run thin and they lasted a lot longer than uh energy analysts expected. Um but it's it's only a matter of time. it's just being kicked down the road. And you can just see the empty uh space in these graphs indicates the absence of the most critical um energy supplies for the world. Um let's take a look at the satellite choke points because this is another uh this is from the space station. Again, this is not from a 35mm camera. This is an onboard uh satellite uh camera. But you're seeing here on the right side, you can see the straight of Hormuz Iran is in the upper right corner. The Mediterranean's in the upper left corner. The Red Sea runs down from the Mediterranean into the Babel Mendde. That is the choke point that is controlled by the Yemeni armed forces and they are carrying out a blockade for a blockade on the uh Saudis. We reported on that a few weeks ago when Saudis uh hit the uh international airport and SA um the Yemenes responded and have said that they're going to enforce a blockade for a blockade. And now that's part of the Iran war. Um and so this is the entire region that you're seeing from the Red Sea on the left to the Persian Gulf on the right and then it and then the United States's basing infrastructure is all in between that which we're going to talk about in a moment. But first, let's look at this uh UK MTO warning um that a Saudi sorry a [clears throat] Saudi tanker was hit off the coast of Yanboo. Yanboo is where the pipeline comes out um in Saudi Arabia. It's a major port uh oil shipping port. Um, and it's about a thousand kilometers from Yemeni uh armed forces territory. And it's also, interestingly, where the sort of the invisible line that the American aircraft carrier strike groups never went south of after the war started. Um but the Yemenes showed this week that they have the capacity to hit with ballistic missiles at 1,000 km distance a moving ship in the area where the uh carrier strike groups operate. So um that's part of the blockade of the um Red Sea into the Suez for um the for the Saudis for the blockade for the blockade siege for siege infrastructure for infrastructure um has brought the choke points to include um Yemen as well and the Babel Menddeab. We can see the Babel Mendde transits over time as well because we know about this from uh number 13 here. We can see the um they've dropped 50% too. And you can see when they dropped, they dropped um largely dropped related to um the battle in the Red Sea um that was in solidarity with Gaza. Um and you can see that those numbers uh as of uh the 10th of August um are about half of what they were before. And we know in the Red Sea, uh, Israel's Red Sea port is bankrupt and basically hasn't had any shipping in it at all for the three years of this war. Um, so last week we looked into the ability of the US to continue this war that is losing in its critically low missiles and missile defense stockpiles and its gutting of the US Air Force MQ9 Reaper drone fleet, which is irreplaceable. Um, this week we're going to look at the battered and abandoned US bases in the Middle East. Let's look at number 14. This basing vulnerability uh for the US was clear upon launching the war in uh late February um when the US pulled personnel abandoned bases and consolidated onto a core group of bases like in Jordan, Muafa Kalti, which we've covered extensively. Um it also uh it's clear to the Gulf countries hosting these bases that that they don't want this war. Um they don't want this war on them because they're hosting these bases. And it's u them that are stepping in. The the the Gulf countries are stepping in and saying that they don't want Trump to escalate. Not clear Trump can escalate, but it's interesting to note that they do not want any part of this too because they are far more vulnerable than Iran. We saw that in in just the 40 days of war. And then in July, there was another um flare up of another few days, but really kinetic war, we're talking about less than 60 days total out of this 6 months of actual fighting because the United States cannot sustain that fighting. And even at that level, they have sailors jumping off carriers um and needing to go into port um because they have been out at sea for so long. Um and that is because of the inability to use these bases which are in their purpose is to extend combat lines for the US. And if you can't land your tankers in these bases, if you can't use Qatar, which is its air operations center to control um to carry out the command of the air war or Bahrain, which is the host of the fifth fleet, to do the naval uh support from inside the Persian Gulf, these bases uh start to have uh less and less function. Just a one note on the Lincoln that uh I reported on last week. The USS Lincoln aircraft carrier uh had left the theater after 200 straight days in combat and the secretary of the Navy said that the carrier executed more than 10,000 sorties. A sort is when a plane takes off uh and lands as a single sorty off the carrier deck. So 10,000 sorties dropping 1.5 million pounds of bombs. Um, and for what it's worth, this week, uh, a sailor, um, while conducting this war, uh, from the Lincoln, um, at home, his father was arrested and detained by ICE while he was on this ship that, uh, sailors were jumping off of. He said, "I've been deployed for over nine months out at sea in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, fighting for my country to give me fighting for my a country that has given me everything. And I just got a call from my dad and he's been taken by ICE." Very American story there. Um connecting overseas, uh soldiers, sailors, and and the homeront there. Let's look at number 15. Um these are the bases. Uh this map from the n from the Washington Post. You can see the bases uh that are red had casualties that we know of uh on those bases. You can see the spread out of those bases uh and the vulnerability of them in proximity to the Iranian coast which is uh very clearly very close to uh all of those bases along the coastline there of the Persian Gulf. Let's look at number 16 because this is from the Congressional Research Service. So this is Sentcom giving this map to the Congressional Research Service and it gives you detailed of each of those bases. Um and we have tracked most of these bases and damage and destruction on almost all of them um just by looking at them uh on the screen here. Uh it's a little complicated to explain to uh radio listeners, but there's so many uh American bases in the area from the UAE to uh Kuwait um that they can barely fit all of the naming of them in there. U but we can see them clearly. In Bahrain, it's the fifth fleet. In Qatar, it's the Aludade air base that was evacuated. Um that's the head of the forward headquarters for central command. uh is just a few uh dozen miles off the coast of uh Iran. In Kuwait, there's massive military in uh installations there. Camp Arif John, the forward headquarters of the US Army um central and the Ali al Salam air base, which we saw be targeted numerous times, which is um um which is about 40 km from the Iraqi border, which you can see there. Again, Kuwait's whole country on the map is basically dots for military bases. And that is the whole point. This is an architecture that was set up because of the Gulf Wars, because of the wars against Iraq starting in 1990 and this base architecture all through the um global war on terror as the Americans called it. but their wars of aggression across um Iraq and Afghanistan when they had uncontested skies and these bases were being used to carry out those wars. Um but now they have a formidable enemy uh who was willing to destroy those bases if uh the United States attacked. They promised they would destroy the bases and they have done so. uh in the UAE aldafra air base is a key critical hub for the US uh air force hub. Um and then Dubai's Jabel Ali port is not a military base but it is where it is the port of call for the Middle East uh that regularly hosts US aircraft um aircraft carriers and other vessels. So these are key installations as well. Multiple ones in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and of course Mafakal Salty in Jordan is where right from the first week of this war we tracked the um the number of fighter jets that were there. Um because obviously the military planners knew that those bases were going to become a problem. I don't think they knew how big a problem uh or else they wouldn't have so recklessly got into this war that they can't win. Uh, but that gives you an idea of those bases. Let's look at the satellite damage. I mean, I've done multiple shows on this. So, if you want to watch those, they're in the resistance report um, uh, playlist on our YouTube channel. You can go back and and find these because I u broke down all of these strikes on these bases. This is a nice uh collection of them put together by the Washington Post that was part of their article that uh tallied at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at military sites across the Middle East that had been destroyed just in the first weeks of the war um that alone. Uh BBC Verify um has said that Iran damaged 20 US military sites since the start of the war. satellite images and video analyzed by BBC verify show. They showed that weeks after we reported it on this show. Um but you can see from the top uh left to right from the top you can see the naval support activity center in Bahrain for the fifth fleet the issa air base um the Rifa air base uh in northern Iraq and Kurdish northern Iraq uh main hub um [snorts] the Ali al-Salm air base camp Arifjan Camp Buring uh Shouba port uh Aluduade air base in Qatar Prince Sultan air base in Saudi and the Alafra air base in um the UAE is in that bottom right corner destroyed. Um and it has led to something that um is similar to what I reported on last week, but the sort of um um the percolation into the mainstream of this idea that these bases are done for and serve no purpose in a world where Iran has the capabilities and is willing to use them uh in the way that they have. Let's look at number 18. And this is from uh Air and Space Magazine headline um that talked about Iran's severely damaged uh US air op center in Qatar soon after the war began. He's talking about the combined arms operation center which is the you know it's one of those rooms where you you see rows of computers and massive walls of computers. They're managing the air war and they had to abandon that facility basically right away when the when the war began. not right away because they thought for a while they could stay in some of these bases. A lot of the uh what is called dispersion, that's what they called it when they sent uh their forces out of these bases didn't happen before the war. It happened after the war began and they realized that they weren't able to defend themselves. So the combined air operations center moved to Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. So they're running the war from South Carolina and these multi-billion dollar bases just sat there getting hammered. According to this story in Air and Space Forces magazine, [snorts] um COC uh COAC um extensive fiber optic damage uh to the facility made it completely unusable and inoperable. Um so that is just one of uh specific example of something that the Americans invested billions of dollars in to organize its aggressive its wars of aggression in the Middle East. um that is now um in ruins. And this of course goes along with um all of the radars at these bases. It's not just the bases that they have to rebuild. They have to rebuild the dozens of radars that they lost. Some of them um like the early warning radars, more than a billion dollars for a single radar. Um multiple THAD radars that are 800 million a piece. um they've lost a dozen or more um tactical array uh phased array radars. All of these things have to be replaced for these bases to even have a purpose. Um and it's just unclear uh whether the US is going to be able to do that because they're not going to be able to do it uh in a um you know in a hot war with Iran. Even if the war right now is somewhat dormant, it could flare up at any moment. you're not sending people into these bases that are abandoned and having them rebuild for billions, many billions, uh rebuilding these bases. So, we're seeing, I think, a real uh possibility of a dramatic restructuring of American um uh force projection uh throughout the world and as a result of the resistance uh of Iran, which I think it's fair to say was inspired by the resistance in Gaza, respired by inspired by the resistance in Lebanon um to carry on the fight that began on October 7th. Um let's look at number 19. Now, this is a famous uh oldie but goodie. Iran attacks force US troops to work remotely, which is really the most New York Times headline way of saying that they went and dispersed them all through civilian areas in civilian apartment buildings and civilian towers um to use them as human shields effectively. I mean, that's certainly what the Americans and the Israelis would call that kind of behavior, but the New York Times calls it working remotely. Um, which is a pretty uh on the nose for the New York Times. In this article, it says, "Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by the American troops are all but uninhabitable. The ones in Kuwait next door to Iran suffering perhaps the most damage." This was in March. So, this was after the first 40 days of war. In March, we started getting some reporting that we had done back uh in uh earlier in the month uh started to get reporting on the fact that the Americans uh are admitting that they have lost at least their newspapers are admitting that they have lost these things. The military still lies about this. SenCom lies about this constantly. Um but uh we remember work from home uh work remotely as these troops went and lived in civilian towers and we saw the IRGC intelligence track them to those towers and attack them. So they had to leave those towers and a lot of them have gone back to the United States um because there is uh Sentcom just sent out um a notice to its uh people who are displaced and said that there um to find housing back in the United States because there is no timeline for returning to these bases. Um let's take a look at the next one because this just came out um just late last week. The Washington Post uh headline here, Pentagon weighing smaller US military presence in the Gulf once the Iran war ends. An analysis which the defense department said was not yet a formal review will help address whether to rebuild strike battered bases, said people familiar with the matter. Uh a lot of people uh didn't think that rebuilding those bases were going to be uh a very um legitimate uh ta uh task that uh will take tens many tens of billions to uh to fix. According to uh um yeah, according to this Washington Post story, let's take a look at 21 because this is the think tank community. They're getting in on it, too. Council on Foreign Relations establishment uh think tank funded uh at least in part by weapons manufacturers themselves. Um this is an article that says rising US casualties in Iran war should be should force a rethink of military basing ironically written by Elliot Abrams of Iran Contra fame also uh of the failed uh he led the failed attempted coup in Gaza in 2006 trying to overthrow uh Hamas. But it's not just um these bases cuz uh yesterday NBC reported that Iranian attacks on US intelligence posts and hardware during the course of the war caused many billions of damage um many billions of dollars of damage. Um NBC reported with four people as sources for this coming from the Pentagon and uh and the intelligence community. The CIA maintains dozens of bases throughout the Middle East. The report said uh stations and embassies had been destroyed in an unprecedented level and the war signifies according to the story and the sources in that story, intelligence sources in that story adding to this um war signifies an unprecedented threat to the CIA and other US agencies in the region. Now, this isn't the same as basing um but it is definitely um auxiliary to that. Um there the Iranians knew where all of those intelligence assets were and struck them hard. We knew that in the first days of the war as well. Um just earlier this week number 22 here has the Financial Times are of America's vast Gulf bases worth rebuilding. Um Iran's attacks exposed vulnerability of the US military footprint [snorts] spanning the region since the 1990s since the Gulf War. Um, for uh almost four decades, the American presence in the Middle East has been anchored by a chain of sprawling bases stretching across the Gulf. But in six months of war, Iran has cast their future into doubt. Financial Times, uh, you know, for their readers and investors, it doesn't sound like Financial Times thinks you should be investing in rebuilding bases, but we'll we'll see how this goes. We'll track this closely, but uh seeing this permeate into the mainstream uh backing up everything that uh we have been witnessing for months is is always just an interesting thing to see. We can see the next one 23. This is um a US Army General Barry McAffrey who is best known for his infamous role in the uh first Iraq invasion um where he uh and where the first where the basing architecture really began. Macaffrey commanded US troops from the 24th in 24th infantry division uh in the notorious Highway of Death massacre that saw hundreds of Iraqi tanks and vehicles that were grouped in defensive formations systematically destroyed along a 50mile stretch of the highway to Bassra fleeing from Kuwait. It was an uncontested annihilation that was carried out uh on retreating Iraqi forces 2 days after the declared ceasefire. Um so and this massive massacre after the ceasefire which is something that we've come to know very well today had its uh roots at least uh going back to 1991. Of course McAffrey was promoted for that uh massacre. Um but here he is you know one of the founding members of these bases saying that in my judgment the US armed forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access to the Gulf States. US will have to negotiate new access in Western Saudi, Israel, and South Europe. But that doesn't work because we watched them do that. After the first 40 days of of the Kinetic War, um the US repositioned everything based on the lessons learned uh and places destroyed in those first 40 days and they moved them all back to Jordan and Israel. We saw that all the refuelers are at Bengurian airport in Tel Aviv. Um, Mwafaka Alsulti air base in Jordan is bristling with planes. And then in July, what was the target in July? The target was not Kuwait. It was Mufa Salty in Jordan. So Jordan doesn't get you far enough away. And people who watched the Iranian um Israeli battle know that the that Israel is not too far away either. Um, but there's a lot of talk about the US going to Israel and um, basically integrating more than they already are onto uh, Israeli bases and Israelis are pushing for this. Um, and we'll see how it goes. They're also pushing to uh, merge their defense uh, industries. Um, we'll see how that goes as well. Um, it's honestly they're basically the same anyway. So them merging together is a sign of weakness from Israel for sure. Um, but it fits with the pattern of American uh Israel being an extension of the American uh political uh millure. Let's look at one other way that we can get around this war. This was shot from a a a new rail line uh in Abu Dhabi. And if we look up in the background there, you see oil terminals that are covered in cages like the Israelis put on top of their tanks. Um that you can see them there. I mean, it's almost a perfect shot. It's like a rail cam because of the speed of the of the train. Um, you get a great shot of this. I've been watching these be built since um at least May. It took them months to build this. Um, but they're basically building cages uh drone cages around the entire uh oil storage facility. And this is also just not a solution to this uh to this war. So, the United States should surrender. Um, let the world economy go back. um let the Middle East reorganize itself uh away from uh the US and its wars of aggression. Um which the countries in the region would do. The first thing that they would do, the Gulf countries, the first thing they would do is probably make relations with with Iran like they you would think that they would do. Um so making these cages around oil facilities is not going to work. It will not work against missiles. Um, but you can see what uh the Gulf states are doing in an attempt to uh try to weather this war. Uh, so this has been the resistance report on day 1,056 of Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza.