🇧🇠🇮🇷 The mystery strike nobody could pin down finally has names: Bahrain and Kuwait, with UAE cover. It may explain the whole shape of this war...
That's the Wall Street Journal's reporting, and Larry Johnson needed one line to make it land: which may be why Iran keeps pounding Kuwait and Bahrain day after day.
If it holds, the map rearranges.
The two Gulf states taking the heaviest retaliation, the ones whose desalination plants and power stations have been hit, aren't being punished for hosting American aircraft. They pulled a trigger.
His verdict on that choice: it may have been a poor one.
The forward-looking thread is a London meeting Axios reports for next week, where Washington and London try to assemble a coalition to protect Hormuz shipping.
The Europeans reportedly set one condition, stop the shooting first, because nobody sends minesweepers into a live fight.
Larry waved the whole thing off, and his reasoning is the war in miniature: the US won't pay the military price freedom of navigation would actually cost, so the only road there runs through negotiating with Iran, which Washington keeps refusing.
He also flagged a sharpened US embassy alert for Israel, an Italian carrier suspending Tel Aviv flights, and satellite imagery showing roughly twenty American aircraft now parked on an Israeli base.
His sharpest line was the caveat that undercuts every optimist: Iran can absolutely manage one day of March-level intensity.
It just can't sustain it.
@NewSonof
