Persian Gulf desalination plants could become military targets in regional war

 

The internal workings of desalination plants can be massive and very complex. Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf region use the fossil fuels under their desert lands not only to make money, but also to make drinking water. The petroleum they produce powers more than 400 desalination plants, which turn seawater into drinkable water.

In the war that began on Feb. 28, 2026, with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, retaliatory attacks from Iranian forces have hit oil refineries and natural gas plants and disrupted tourism and aviation. Those attacks all hurt Gulf nations’ economies and their hard-won reputations for safety and stability.

But Iranian strikes have also already hit close to a key desalination plant in Dubai. Iranian strikes on March 2 on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port hit about 12 miles (20 kilometers) away from a massive complex with 43 desalination units that are key to the city’s production of more than 160 billion gallons of water each year.

And there has already been damage to the UAE’s Fujairah F1 power and water plant and at Kuwait’s Doha West plant. In both cases, the damage seems to have stemmed from attacks on nearby ports or from falling debris from drone interceptions.

Saltwater kingdoms

The region’s monarchies are often described as petro-states, but they have also become what I call saltwater kingdoms, global superpowers in the production of human-made fresh water drawn from the sea. Desalination is part of the reason there are golf courses, fountains, water parks and even indoor ski slopes with manufactured snow.

All together, eight of the 10 largest desalination plants in the world are in the Arabian Peninsula. Israel’s two Sorek plants round out the list. The countries of the Arabian Peninsula have about 60% of global water-desalination capacity. And plants close to Iran, around the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, produce more than 30% of the world’s desalinated water.

Roughly 100 million people in the Gulf region rely on desalination plants for their water. Without them, almost nobody would be able to live in Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE – or much of Saudi Arabia, including its capital, Riyadh.

Sabotage of water supplies

CIA worries about attacks on Gulf region desalination plants date back to the 1980s. During Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, those worries became real. After coalition forces began bombing Iraqi positions in January 1991, part of Iraqi troops’ response was to release millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf. As the massive oil slick drifted south, U.S. and Saudi officials feared it was meant to sabotage desalination systems.

Workers installed protective booms to shield intake valves at major plants, especially the one that supplies much of Riyadh’s water. In Kuwait, Iraqi sabotage damaged or destroyed much of the country’s desalination capacity.

Kuwaiti authorities also turned to Turkey and Saudi Arabia to supply some 750 water tankers and 200 trucks to import an 18-ton emergency supply of bottled water. U.S.-supplied generators and mobile desalination units provided additional temporary relief, though the full recovery took years.

More recent threats

Fears of attacks on desalination plants resurfaced after Yemen’s Houthi movement launched drones and missiles at Saudi facilities at Al-Shuqaiq in 2019 and 2022 – though they did no lasting damage.

Iran’s weapons are far more numerous and sophisticated than the Houthis’, though, so if it attacked desalination plants, the damage could be significant.

There is an irony here: Iran’s capital city of Tehran has a water shortage crisis so serious that in 2025 the government reportedly considered relocating the drought-stricken capital to the coast. But Iran is less vulnerable to attacks on desalination, because its water supply relies instead on dams and wells.

Whatever else the war may be about, water could well become a major factor in the violence and leave lasting political scars. And if either side were to intentionally attack water sources or desalination plants, it would clearly be a human-rights violation.

 Michael Christopher Low, Associate Professor of History; Director, Middle East Center, University of Utah, The Conversation

 

"A week into the United States’ war on Iran, there are a few things we know—and many, many more that we don’t"

 

Much of Iran’s senior leadership died in the initial strikes, and the U.S. has had considerable success against the Iranian navy. Iran has retaliated with strikes against at least 10 countries. 

But the Iranian regime shows no sign of surrender. And President Donald Trump and his senior officials have offered shifting and sometimes contradictory statements about the reasons for going to war, why now, and the goals of the operation. 

But first, what we know. An Israeli strike in Tehran took out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other regime leaders last Saturday. During Khamenei’s 36-year reign, he empowered the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and built up a network of terrorist proxy organizations that threatened Israel and caused wider mayhem in the Middle East. 

In her obituary of Khamenei, Charlotte detailed the supreme leader’s early years: “The new supreme leader, resentful of how little authority he wielded as president, quickly moved to consolidate power under his new office. He seized control of Iranian media, sidelined political opponents, and hollowed out state institutions. Presidents of the Islamic Republic have served more or less at Khamenei’s pleasure since Hashemi Rafsanjani’s term ended in 1997.”  

Where to begin with what we don’t know. For starters, is Trump’s decision to launch a war constitutional? It’s complicated, as our Dispatch Debate revealed. Ilya Somin argued that it’s “blatantly unconstitutional” and cited no less an authority than the Founding Fathers: “Hamilton and Madison disagreed over whether the president had the power to issue a neutrality proclamation. 

But they were united on the proposition that no one man could take the nation to war, and that the executive must refrain from initiating such a conflict without congressional authorization. There are few important constitutional issues on which there was such broad agreement among the Founders.” On the other hand, Michael Lucchese maintained that the Founding Fathers favored a strong executive, noting that the Articles of Confederation fell apart precisely because the new government lacked such a position. 

He wrote, “Simply put, as the Founders conceived it, executive prerogative altogether defies legislation. They drew on an older, English conception to define the concept, which John Locke articulated in his Second Treatise on Government when he defined prerogative as the ‘power to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.’ This tradition was common sense to the Framers who created the presidency.”

Legal or not, the United States is at war. What are the goals of the operation, and what will accomplishing those goals entail? Trump himself has offered different answers. 

In a video statement released after the airstrikes began, he didn’t promise regime change—saying the mission was to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”—but he did call on the Iranian people to “take over your government.” 

But he’s also said he might be open to working with a successor to Khamenei along the lines of Delcy Rodríguez taking over after Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. He’s said the war might last four to five weeks. But reports emerged Thursday that CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, has asked the Pentagon for more intelligence officers to support the operation for at least 100 days.

Contributing writer Paul D. Miller writes that war with Iran is justifiable, citing its sponsorship of terror, attempts to gain nuclear weapons, and its brutal crackdowns on its own people. And he runs through the details of Iranian action against Americans. There is, however, a “but.” He writes:

That is why the American national security state has spent decades planning this war, why it unfolds with cold precision, and why Trump is likely to declare victory, sooner or later, over the smoking ruins of Iran’s military, its nuclear program, and the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

But neither Trump nor anyone else has spent the equivalent time planning for the day after. The agencies that had a mandate to think about such things—the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development—are precisely those most damaged by the DOGE-induced self-lobotomy of the federal bureaucracy last year.

The lack of a coherent strategy and the conflicting messages have Nick Catoggio thinking about what Secretary of State Colin Powell told President George W. Bush before the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “You break it, you own it.” And Nick notes that Trump’s first campaign, when he ran on ending “forever wars,” was a direct response to the failures in Iraq. 

The Donald Trump of 2016 treated most norms of American government as a given, and so he accepted the Pottery Barn rule on its own terms: If breaking a country meant buying it, then we wouldn’t break it. But the Donald Trump of 2026 believes that norms of American government exist only insofar as he’s willing to tolerate them, and he’s no longer willing to tolerate the Pottery Barn rule.

“You break it, you bought it”? Says who?

What we’re seeing in the war he just started is an attitude we’d expect from a guy with a history of bankrupting casinos: The United States may have broken Iran, but we’re not going to “buy” it by trying to preserve order there. Why should we? Who’s going to stick us with the bill if we refuse? Trump will do what he likes and leaves someone else holding the bag, the same amoral worldview that’s served him well his whole life. That view is now U.S. policy

The president is also creating divisions within the MAGA movement. Jonah Goldberg noted in his Wednesday G-File that the war has put Vice President J.D. Vance in an extremely awkward position, and Michael Warren wrote a column about the most prominent MAGA media personalities—Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly—splitting with Trump over the war. 

He writes that the GOP base supports the war for now, but that it could change quickly if anything goes poorly. He writes: “Could Bannon and others in the MAGA universe be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine warning Trump and his party that the broad support he’s getting for the Iran war from his voters may evaporate quickly?”

You can check out our complete coverage of the Iran war here. Rest assured that we will have more next week—and the week after. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend. 

-Rachel Larimore, The Dispatch

The Bombing of an Iranian Girls' School

 

US investigators reportedly believe that American forces were behind the bombing of an Iranian girls’ school that killed more than 160 people—mostly young children—during the initial wave of attacks launched Saturday by President Donald Trump in coordination with the Israeli military.

Citing two unnamed officials, Reuters reported Thursday that US military investigators have found it is “likely” that American forces were responsible for the deadly strike on the school in the southern Iranian town of Minab, though the investigation has not yet been completed. Schools are protected under international law, and targeting them is a war crime.

“Reuters was unable to determine more details about the investigation, including what evidence contributed to the tentative assessment, what type of munition was used, who was responsible, or why the U.S. might have struck the school,” the outlet noted. “The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, did not rule out the possibility that new evidence could emerge that absolves the U.S. of responsibility and points to another responsible party in the incident.”

“If a US role were to be confirmed,” Reuters added, “the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of US conflicts in the Middle East.”

HuffPost Akbar Shahid Ahmed echoed Reuters’ reporting, writing that Pentagon officials “told Congress in multiple briefings this week that they believed the US was most likely responsible (though probe ongoing).”

The reporting came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that concluded the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike,” given that American forces were simultaneously bombarding an adjacent Iranian naval base. The Times also rejected the claim that an Iranian missile hit the elementary school.

“The strikes were first reported on social media shortly after 11:30 am local time,” the Times reported. “An analysis of those posts—as well as bystander photos and videos captured within an hour of the strikes—helps corroborate that the school was hit at the same time as the naval base. One video, pinpointed by geolocation experts, showed several large plumes of smoke billowing from the area of the base and the school.”

Beth Van Schaack, a former State Department official who currently teaches at Stanford University’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, told the Times that “given the US’ intelligence capabilities, they should have known that a school was in the vicinity.”

Trump administration officials have said very little about the Iranian school strike in their triumphant rhetoric about the war, which Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth hailed as the “most lethal, most complex, and most precise aerial operation in history.” Hegseth has also openly dismissed what he’s called “stupid rules of engagement,” rejecting constraints on US forces that are designed to prevent the killing of civilians.

Asked about the school strike during a March 4 press conference, Hegseth responded: “All I know—all I can say is that we’re investigating that. We, of course, never target civilian targets, but we’re taking a look and investigating that.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred reporters to the Pentagon when asked about the attack but added that “the United States would not target, deliberately target, a school,” in purported contrast to the Iranian government, which Rubio claimed is “deliberately targeting civilians” because “they are a terroristic regime.”

Two first responders to the scene of the attack, as well as a parent of one of the killed children, told Middle East Eye earlier this week that the school was hit by two strikes, a possible “double-tap” attack. An Al Jazeera investigation concluded the attack on the school was likely deliberate.

Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, called the school attack “a horrific US war crime, up there with My Lai,” referring to US soldiers’ massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968. The US military initially covered up the massacre.

“In a sane world, Hegseth would resign, Congress would hold immediate hearings and establish an investigation, and the US would come clean,” Konyndyk wrote on social media. “None of that is likely, so international mechanisms should kick in, including the [International Criminal Court]. And Hegseth should probably talk to a lawyer.”

On Thursday, as US and Israeli officials vowed to ramp up their assault on Iran, two boys’ schools southwest of Tehran were reportedly bombed. 

“The targeting of civilians, educational facilities, and medical institutions constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law,” a group of United Nations experts said earlier this week.

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

“The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water"

 

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday was condemned for his boasts on Wednesday about sinking an Iranian military ship after allegations emerged that it was “defenseless” at the time it was torpedoed in international waters by a US submarine.

Military.com reported Thursday that the Iranian ship had been departing from a biennial multinational naval training exercise that it had been invited to participate in by the Indian government. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far remained silent on the US attack on the ship, but other politicians in India delivering sharp condemnations.

According to the Times of India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi tore into Modi for not speaking up after the US torpedoed a boat that his government had invited into its waters. “The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean,” Gandhi said. “Yet the PM has said nothing. At a moment like this, we need a steady hand at the wheel. Instead, India has a compromised PM who has surrendered our strategic autonomy.”

In a social media post, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said there was no way that the Iranian ship could have been perceived as any kind of military threat.

“I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition,” he wrote. “It was defenseless... The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship’s presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind.”

Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted that, in addition to striking what appears to have been a defenseless boat, the US also didn’t help rescue any of the shipwrecked men who were aboard the vessel.

“The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water,” Grim commented. “I am hard pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so cowardly and despicable. We are genuinely in a league of our own, and American media—mostly shrugging off the bombing of a girl's school and acting as if carpet bombing Tehran is a normal military tactic—is deeply complicit.”

Author Bruno Maçães also pointed to the decision to leave the shipwrecked crew at sea as an act of historic depravity. “Really quite extraordinary that the US bombed an Iranian ship and then left the surviving sailors to drown,” Maçães wrote. “There are many, many accounts of the Nazis or Imperial Japan saving survivors at sea. I see we have now dropped below that level.”

Mohamad Safa, executive director of PVA Patriotic Vision, an international multilateral organization with special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said that the US attack on the Iranian ship constituted either a war crime or straight-up murder.

“What Pete Hegseth ordered the military to do violates international law,” he wrote. “The Iranian ship was near Sri Lanka, in international waters outside the combat zone and on a training exercise. Under the Geneva Conventions, you are obligated to rescue the crew of a ship that you sink during war. Abandoned any survivors and leaving them to drown is illegal and a war crime.”

-Common Dreams

"Donald Trump is waging an illegal war"

"It is so much worse than you thought." said Elizabeth Warren after walking out of a classified briefing on Trump's Iran war. Senators are TERRIFIED and you should be too.

Warren said the Trump administration has no plan in Iran, that the war is based on lies, and that it was launched without any imminent threat to the country. She didn't mince words. She said she's angry. She said she feels grief for the people already dead. And she promised to fight to end it. She wasn't alone.

Senator Chris Murphy called it "a multi-trillion-dollar, open-ended conflict with a very confusing and constantly shifting set of goals." Senator Blumenthal told reporters he's "more fearful than ever" that U.S. ground troops are coming.

Senator Van Hollen said the administration couldn't even get their story straight behind closed doors, calling it "complete incoherence" with "constantly shifting narratives." Senator Markey said the briefing "confirmed what we already knew: Donald Trump is waging an illegal war, and he has no plan to end it."

These are sitting U.S. senators who just saw the classified intelligence, and they came out looking like they'd seen a ghost. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent his Wednesday briefing bragging about "death and destruction from the sky all day long" and saying the U.S. is "punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be." He also found time to whine about press coverage.

Six American service members are already dead. The administration's justification for the war, that Iran was preparing an unprovoked attack on U.S. forces, has never been backed by official intelligence assessments. Rubio's own explanation amounted to saying the "imminent threat" was that Iran might retaliate if attacked, which is not a threat, it's a consequence of your own decision.

Trump promised no more forever wars. Five days in, senators with security clearances are warning us this has no endgame, no justification, and no exit. The only plan appears to be more bombs. Remember this the next time someone tells you elections don't matter.

-The Other 98%

Questions Need to be Answered

 

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed. That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as The New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Jared Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the United States and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on February 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took. And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of February 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Jared’s American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligence window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”

The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a backchannel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is underway and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again. The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.

-Thom Hartmann

 

"The war was unpopular with Americans before Trump started bombing Iran"

...The Trump administration has been able to articulate neither a clear reason for what Trump calls a “war” against Iran nor a goal to be accomplished by the war that is costing $1 billion a day. On February 19, less than ten days before Trump started bombing Iran, Trump told his “Board of Peace” that “[w]e’ve done the biggest thing of all. We have peace in the Middle East right now.” Today Trump told reporters that if he hadn’t struck Iran, it would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks, a conclusion U.S. intelligence agencies reject.

Trump told reporters today that “we’re doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly,” rating it 15 on a scale of 1 to 10. But Americans stranded in Middle Eastern countries are desperate to get out, and the government has not been able to help them. When asked today why not, Trump answered:

“Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others. You’re seeing that right now. And a lot of those missiles that are hitting in those are stationary. Those were aimed there for a long period of time at these other countries. So I think I was right about that. We attacked first, and if we didn’t, it could have been, you know, look, we’re really decimating them. They’re being decimated. And if we didn’t. If we didn’t, and by the way, we have massive amounts of ammunition. We have the high end. A lot of it was given away stupidly by Biden, very stupidly, for free. And I’m all for Ukraine, but they gave away a lot. As you know, when I give away ammunition, everybody pays for it. The European Union is paying for it, then they can do what they want with it, but they are giving it, let’s say, to Ukraine, and it’s okay, but we gave away a lot of high end but we have plenty. But we have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war. And we have an, really an unlimited supply. We also have a lot of the very high end stored in different countries throughout the world. With this, we’re literally storing it there, which is actually something that I insisted on in my first term. I rebuilt the military. In my first term, the military is great. A lot of, not unbelievable, amount of of ammunition, or munitions, as they say, were given away to you know, the Wall Street Journal incorrectly covered the story when they said that it was given away to the Middle East, not to the Middle East was given away to Ukraine. Very little was given to the Middle East. Middle East would buy a lot. And some of the nations, because they’re rich, they have a lot, but it was given away to Ukraine, and it just should have been done. Look, it’s a war that should have never happened. If I were president, that war would have never happened. But we have a tremendous amount of munitions, ammunition at the upper upper level, middle and upper level, all of which is really powerful stuff.”

Notably, Trump had no answer for why there was no plan to evacuate Americans. Instead, he made it clear he is worried about experts’ assessment that the U.S. is low on high-end munitions and interceptors. According to Ellen Mitchell of The Hill, the U.S. is low on those weapons not because it has helped to supply Ukraine, but because it “blew through 25 percent of its stockpile over just a few days of operations against Iran in June 2025.” And before that operation, the U.S. military used $200 million worth of munitions in three weeks of attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, a bombing campaign that did little to change the Houthis’ behavior.

Despite the administration's apparent lack of either planning or goals in its attack on Iran, Senate Republicans today refused to rein in Trump’s attack on Iran with a war powers resolution to bring the war to a stop. While some said they were nervous about the apparent lack of a plan for the conflict, others said it was imperative to demonstrate support for the troops by supporting the war, regardless of how we got into it.

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a difficult election in the fall, said: “Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops. At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress.”

But the American people are not on board. The war was unpopular with Americans before Trump started bombing Iran, and support for it has dropped since it began. According to G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers, only 34% of Americans support the attack on Iran...

-Heather Cox Richardson