After Trump greenlit another costly “conflict of choice” for which Republicans are famous, this time in Iran, the American public is apparently being kept in the dark about destruction on U.S. military bases and to aircraft. Trump’s boondoggle in Iran has cost taxpayers at least $11B so far—but damage to U.S. assets in the Middle East from reprisal attacks will require another $5 billion in repairs, according to Sarah-Jane Collins writing in The Daily Beast.
American bases in the Middle East suffered ‘extensive damage’ from Iranian strikes that is ‘far worse than publicly acknowledged,’ a new report alleges.
Insiders tell NBC News that the public has been shielded from the true damage inflicted by Iran, including that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet breached U.S. air defenses to strike a base in Kuwait.
NBC writes that its conclusion is based on findings by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and interviews with congressional aides and other U.S. officials.
AEI’s issuing a report embarrassing to Trump is notable, as the group connects directly to some his most ardent boosters, like Dick DeVos (husband of Betsy DeVos) and Harlan Crow, who famously lavished Clarence Thomas with gifts and bribes. (AEI is also linked to J.D. Vance’s scam charity called “Our Ohio Renewal.”)
By any financial or human-cost measure, the Iran conflict is objectively a failure—based on AEI’s findings alone.
AEI’s assessed that Iran hit more than 100 targets across 11 U.S. bases in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Two officials told NBC that the F-5 attack marked ‘the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years.’
AEI estimates Iran inflicted well over $5 billion in damage in its retaliatory strikes, according to NBC. That comes in addition to the deaths of 13 service members and injuries to nearly 400 troops, per the Pentagon’s count.
What should’ve been 7-day scandal in U.S. media was largely reported on procedural grounds: per Daily Beast, “White House has asked private satellite companies not to publish images of U.S. bases in the region after they were struck by Iran.” That “request” (again, more like a demand) was disclosed by Planet Labs in an April 4 email to customers that said its 14-day blackout of the areas “was being extended.”
Daily Beast doesn’t go into granular detail in their piece, but the point here is that Trump’s associates demand was backdated. In other words, officials weren’t just blocking future images of destruction on U.S. bases—they sought to to memory-hole what had already been collected back to March 9. That’s not even giving lip service to a security precaution, it’s retroactive erasure.
Per The Intercept, there’s also an active coverup happening to obscure the actual number of casualties sustained by U.S. military. There is precedent for opaque (to put it mildly) reporting of dead and injured soldiers: “Not long after Trump first took office in 2017 the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan—an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.”
Donald Trump’s regime has been following Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025 playbook to the letter, as the team at TrumpFile warned throughout 2024. Entirely likely that the regime had been planning on attacking Iran from the jump, with Heritage’s manifesto falsely claiming that a “Republican president had an obligation to ‘free Iran.'” True, we don’t need more evidence of incompetence, but Marco Rubio also fired oil-and-gas experts at State Department fully 7 months before the Iran strikes—expertise that would have come in handy now that oil prices have skyrocketed and the supply chain in chaos.
In many ways, a full-on Iran assault was foreshadowed in Trump’s first regime with the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 and Israel’s murder of Iran’s top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh—in which U.S. officials were likely involved.
UPDATE: With our recent reporting about deteriorating conditions aboard some American battleships, new information has come out that credibly links problems with USS Lincoln to Iran’s bombing of a base in Bahrain. See the above report from New York Times for more.
SOURCES
- Daily Beast
- NBC News (paywall)
- NBC News – Archived
- NDTV
- The Intercept
- Satnews
