Pentagon weighs leaving Persian Gulf after Iran ‘exposed vulnerabilities’: Report
The Cradle | August 18, 2026
The Pentagon is reassessing its military footprint in Persian Gulf countries after months of losses inflicted by Iran, the Washington Post reported on 18 August.
Two people familiar with the ongoing analysis told The Post that one of the central questions before the Pentagon is whether to pull troops back from the Persian Gulf, where the largest US bases overseas have absorbed much of the Iranian retaliatory strikes.
The scale of damage suffered by those installations has compelled Washington to rethink where its forces should be located.
The Gulf holds the biggest and most entrenched US bases in the region, with Bahrain hosting the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet, while Kuwait and other states house Army and Air Force assets.
Six US soldiers were killed in a March strike on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait, and more than 200 US facilities have been damaged or destroyed since the war began in February.
Washington has also lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, accounting for a quarter of the entire fleet, at a replacement cost of up to $2.25 billion, and has burned through more than 1,000 advanced air-defense interceptors, draining nearly its entire stockpile of Patriot and THAAD missiles.
The Pentagon has already indicated it may not rebuild the damaged bases as they stood, and is instead weighing a shift of troops westward.
Michael Ratney, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, named Jordan, Israel, and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast as possible destinations, though he acknowledged the added distance was no perfect fix, as Iranian missiles have already reached all three throughout the US war on Iran.
A regional intelligence source told Press TV that the Pentagon has concluded that no military plan currently exists that would guarantee open shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or secure energy stability in the Persian Gulf, an admission that acknowledges Iran’s advantage in the waterway that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil.
CNN reported in early August that the US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) intelligence branch had emailed military analysts asking for “creative and unconventional” ideas for pressuring Iran, after commanders concluded that continued US strikes were failing to achieve Washington’s goals.
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From the Archives
The Lies Behind the Oklahoma City Bombing
By Richard Booth | The Libertarian Institute | August 18, 2024
Despite the seemingly simple conclusion behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, the investigation was exceedingly complicated. To this day, it is still the FBI’s most massive investigation, comprised of millions of pages of evidence. Careful analysis of this paper trail shows that the official narrative of the FBI and ATF is in fact a half-truth that ignores findings supported by the records. The FBI and ATF’s positions are frequently backed up with misleading statements, and in some instances, total fabrications.
In an honest investigation, there would be no reason to concoct and disseminate lies. If we believe that the FBI and ATF investigations were fair and legitimate, then we would expect to not find so many blatant examples of dishonesty. Yet, they exist: one after another, often repeated, and affirmed as truth. Some lies are small, others large. But what they have in common is a systemic problem that speaks to the very integrity of the agencies tasked with investigating this crime. The FBI is not a person suffering from a disorder that causes delusions. If an FBI or ATF official is formulating a lie, or propagating an extant lie, there is an objective.
All too often, it appears that the aim of these agencies is to conceal an inconvenient truth, to hide something that may otherwise invalidate the official narrative or camouflage something too heinous for the public to accept. Federal agencies’ overall deceptive pattern points to shared complicity or guilt, which should be of great concern.
In this essay we’ll examine some of the lies and wrongdoing that officials at the FBI and ATF have engaged in regarding their investigation(s) of the Oklahoma City bombing. I have uncovered half a dozen examples throughout investigating this case. Initially, I did not go out of my way looking for deception. It was something I continually discovered naturally. In some cases, the lies may be related to one another and will provide insight and clarity about what happened on the morning of April 19, 1995. … continue
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