Lessons from the Iran war that Middle Eastern states will not learn

Gulf propaganda continues to hold considerable sway.

The two-week ceasefire in the illegal and unprovoked war on Iran imposed by the Israelis and Americans is nearing its end with a new round of bombings seemingly imminent as the Iranians refuse to surrender their sovereign rights to foreign diktats meant to cripple them and turn them into easy meat to be devoured at leisure.

This brief lull in fighting should have given the collaborating Persian Gulf regimes plenty to ponder and potentially change course from their default position as American-Israeli proxies at the service of Israeli plans of dominating the Middle East. However, as I predicted at the start of the war, no course correction appears on the horizon as the Gulf monarchies double down in their servitude to the Israeli-American designs in the region — against the interests of their own populations.

American bases are an Achilles heel

The retaliatory Iranian strikes on American bases in five of the six Gulf Cooperation Council states — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain — and Jordan have proven that the presence of American troops on the Arabian soil is no guarantee of security. The bases are ready targets, and they also put local residents at risk from enemy fire as well as from shrapnel resulting from interception attempts. There is no clear data on the damage sustained at American bases across the region, but open-source analysis suggests that they have taken substantial hits. Many of these bases were running short of interceptors, effectively making them sitting ducks if Iran escalated its assault.

While propagandists of the Gulf regimes have claimed that these bases were not used to attack Iran, flight tracker data, satellite imagery, and top American officials, including Trump himself, have contradicted these claims. “And they turned against them and really became very powerfully aligned” Trump said of the GCC states coalescing against Iran. “And they were with us, but they weren’t with us very obliquely. They were with us.” Hegseth referred to the collaborating Gulf states as “exceptional teammates.”

Soon after the announcement of the ceasefire, Gulf regime influencers were boasting about their participation in the barbarism against Iran through inane tweets. Here is an example:

This chest-thumping notwithstanding, many insiders in these regimes realised and even vocalised that their resources were merely being used in the service of preserving the genocidal Israeli state, even if it meant using Gulf populations as human shields.

However, having completely submitted themselves to the West, there appear to be very few ways the Gulf regimes could extricate themselves from this quagmire of their own making. It does not take a Nostradamus to predict that the moment any of these monarchs refuse to do the Israeli-American bidding, they will be immediately replaced by someone willing to do as they are told. The failure to develop a skilled population and an industrial base, along with the outsourcing of security to Western mafiosi, has reduced the Gulf states to little more than shining mirages in the Arabian desert.

The humiliation of Arab Zionists

Sectarianism is rife

Among other things, the war on Iran is being used to fuel intense sectarianism among Muslims worldwide. While a significant chunk of global Muslims — irrespective of the Shia-Sunni sectarian divide — are firmly behind Iran’s right to resist the barbarism imposed upon it, there are powerful forces attempting to sow hatred against Iranians. These attempts have taken many forms, ranging from tacit disapproval of Shia Iran — for example, omitting prayers for the suffering Iranians after congregational prayers — to explicit disavowal, such as dedicating entire sermons to denouncing them.

Since ordinary Muslims have had no trouble picking the righteous side in this war, all forms of propaganda are being deployed by the Gulf regimes and their Western masters to change their opinion. One of the most repulsive efforts in this regard was made yesterday. Mishari bin Rashid Alafasy, a Kuwaiti national and renowned Qur’an reciter whose voice is the default on most Qur’an apps, released a song for his 12 million YouTube subscribers on Sunday. Contradicting reality, the lyrics to the song boast about the performance of the Gulf regimes and their militaries in fending off the Iranian retaliation. Interestingly, the lyrics refer to the citizens of the Gulf states as people of tauheed (belief in the oneness of God, the central Islamic tenet), with the unsaid implication that Iranians are not people of tauheed and, therefore, of suspect faith. The song goes on to name every leader of the GCC states and singles out the Saudi crown prince for special praise. “Muhammad bin Salman is our protector,” the lyrics goes.

These same oil-rich states have failed to deliver fuel to the destroyed and barely-functioning hospitals in the Gaza Strip over the past two and a half years of the ongoing genocide, but Alafasy never decried the Gulf leadership for its failure, or sang an elegy for Gaza’s slaughtered children. While he remained silent on the genocidal assault on Gaza, he went a step further, praising the Gulf monarchs for their complicity in the destruction of Iran.

While Alafasy enjoys enormous popularity, he is not the only prominent religious figure to praise Gulf treachery against Iran. Othman al-Khamis, a popular Kuwaiti preacher, released a video statement praising Kuwaiti soldiers for putting their lives on the line to protect Camp Patriot, an American base in Kuwait. “To our brothers, the sons of the Kuwaiti armed forces stationed at the Patriot batteries and the naval bases: You are today the first line of defence for our religion, our land, and our people,” al-Khamis said, toeing the Kuwaiti regime line.

No light at the end of the tunnel

While the resource-rich Gulf regimes actively participate in an illegal and unprovoked war against yet another Muslim state, they have also unleashed propaganda to sow internal divisions among Muslims and turn popular opinion against Iran. Meanwhile, the Israelis have already set their sights on the next Muslim state as they continue their quest to wreak havoc across West Asia in pursuit of Greater Israel.

Over the past several weeks, it has become increasingly likely that plans are afoot against Turkey. “We see that not only the Netanyahu government, but also some figures in the opposition, are trying to declare Turkiye a new enemy as part of their political language,” Turkey’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan said last week. “This is something first introduced as a necessity of street politics, and then an attempt is made to turn it into state strategy.”

While two and a half years of genocide in the Gaza Strip failed to unify Muslim states into collective action against the Israeli and American barbarians, the war on Iran has made those divisions even starker. Since the start of the assault on Iran, I have spent a considerable amount of time disabusing politically inclined relatives and friends of the notion of good-intentioned Gulf monarchs. Yet, Gulf propaganda continues to hold considerable sway.

If there is any lesson in all of this, it is that division has become the most effective weapon deployed against the region. Until that reality is confronted — honestly and collectively — no state will be secure, no alliance will be stable, and no people will be spared from the barbarism now engulfing Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon. Unity is no longer an ideal; it is a necessity for survival.

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