No water in Kuwait means no oil
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan
Cross-posted from Informed Comment
Kuwait City – Photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Photo by Zairon
In response to the renewed American bombing of southeastern Iran ports and facilities, including civilian infrastructure, the Iranian military responded Saturday with attacks on US bases and the infrastructure of Arab allies of the US, such as a desalinization plant and oil facilities in Kuwait and US personnel and installations in Jordan, where two American soldiers were killed and several more wounded.
The US bases and radar in Jordan are part of the way that the US and Israel intercept Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and Iran is attempting to weaken those defenses in case Israel begins attacking it again. Iran also targeted Bahrain, the HQ of the US Fifth Fleet.
Kuwait has 13,500 US service personnel at 7 bases, the largest contingent in the Middle East. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps believes that the US military establishment in Kuwait has been an essential component in the war on Iran and that therefore both those bases and Kuwaiti infrastructure are fair game, since the ruling Al Sabah has allied with Washington against Tehran. Kuwait is a small country of 5 million, only 1.5 million of them citizens and the rest guest workers. It sought US bases after having been invaded by Iraq in 1990-91, when the US helped expel the forces of then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The Al Sabah believed that US bases would be a guarantee against further annexation attempts by bigger nearby regional powers, and did not anticipate that the erratic Netanyahu and Trump would attack Iran and make Kuwait a target.
On Friday, Iran targeted a Kuwaiti power plant and a desalinization facility, causing at least two major fires to break out that occupied several major firefighting crews for a day until they were controlled. About 90% of Kuwait’s drinking water comes from 8 desalinization plants, which produce almost half all the water used in the country.
A senior military adviser to Iran’s clerical Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, warned that if in the coming days, America continues the war, Iran will move from the phase of proportionate retaliation to a phase of going on the attack. Maj. General Mohsen Rezai said that the conflict would then move to the stage of trans-regional war.
Certainly, Kuwait on Friday and Saturday must have felt caught up in a trans-regional war.
The Kuwaiti petroleum company also reported damaged to oil facilities.
According to the state-run Kuna news service, Serdar Dincel writes, the “Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said on Saturday that one of its vital oil facilities was hit in repeated Iranian attacks, causing ‘significant material damage and some injuries.’”
Kuwait Airlines halted flights on Saturday, saying they would be rescheduled.
The US has struck water installations, a railway station, and civilian bridges in Iran, for which the IRGC is taking revenge. Early Sunday morning the US hit the ports of Bandar Abbas and Sirik.
On Saturday US fighter jets or missiles had struck a water facility in the town of Bonji in southwestern Iran, leaving people in twenty villages in Jask district without water. Jask has a port of the same name that gives Iran access to the Gulf of Oman to the east of the Strait of Hormuz, which the US navy has again closed to Iranian shipping.
Both the Iranian and American strikes on water facilities are war crimes.
The Trump administration is attempting to signal to Iran that continued defiance of Washington will result in the depopulation of coastal districts such as Jask. But it only has about 60,000 people in a country of 93 million.
Iran is replying that if Trump and Hegseth (and Netanyahu) push them too far, they can depopulate Kuwait, a country of 5 million that accounted for 10% of all the crude oil and condensate exported from the Persian Gulf last year. Hitting the water plants is in some ways more effective than hitting oil facilities. Bottom line, Iran can inflict way more pain on the world economy and on US gasoline prices than Trump can inflict on it.
Just to be clear, if Iranian drones disabled the other 7 desalinization plants in Kuwait, everyone would just have to stream out of the country immediately or risk dying of renal failure within 3 days (how long a typical person can go without water). No people means no oil pumping.
With strategic oil reserves both of countries and of private corporations depleted by the releases this spring and summer, and with China coming back into the oil market, Trump’s prolongation of the crisis at the Strait of Hormuz threatens to provoke a long-feared spike in energy prices. That development could harm global economic growth this year and produce long lines at gasoline stations just in time for the US midterms.
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