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, reported Middle East Eye. “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. “We are not seeing a full and accurate reporting of the extent of damage that has been done to US bases in the region,” he added.
“The bases around the region are suffering real damage, and I think it’s very unlikely that we’re ever going to go back and put our Fifth Fleet back in Bahrain. It’s too vulnerable,” he added. “So in a sense, the entire purpose of ‘America’s Middle East’ has come crashing down [and] we don’t have an alternative way yet of articulating or thinking about what might replace it.”
