Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

On Thursday, March 19, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Faisal warned Iran that tolerance for its regional attacks was running short — and that the Saudi regime has “the right to take military actions if deemed necessary.” He elaborated that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have “very significant capacities and capabilities that they could bring to bear” if the attacks continue. This came a day after Iranian attacks on Gulf energy sites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, which Iran said was in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an Iranian gas field.

Over the past three weeks of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, Iran has increasingly targeted sites across the Gulf, further regionalizing the war. Among its prime targets are U.S. military bases in the region: Iran has targeted, and damaged, at least 17 U.S. sites in the region, 11 of which are military bases. The two largest bases, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar and the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, host 10,000 and 9,000 U.S. military personnel, respectively — of an estimated 50,000 U.S. military personnel across the region.

The existence of these military bases should alert us to a larger problem — that the U.S. has come to dominate the region militarily, building relationships with local regimes that further encourage repression and domination. Now, Iranian retaliation against these bases spurred by U.S.-Israeli attacks is reigniting a divide between Gulf leaders and their populations.

Popular Pressure and the First Wave of U.S. Military Bases

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. had very few military bases in the Middle East — and these were not permanent, but subject to popular pressure that led to their removal during the 1960s. One of the first U.S. military bases in the Middle East was built in 1946 in Dhahran, atop a major Saudi oil field. This was just after the U.S. discovered that Saudi Arabia was an oil-rich kingdom, and thus as it began to orient towards the Middle East as a region of key strategic interest. A year later, Aramco, the oil company based in Saudi Arabia, became dominated by U.S. firms.

But the U.S. military base at Dhahran was removed in 1962, after anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist sentiment gained strength across the region in the 1950s and ‘60s. Throughout the 1950s, Saudi Arabia witnessed a militant labor movement made up of both Saudi and other Arab workers from across the region, the latter of whom brought Arab nationalist, socialist, and communist ideas to the country. The movement initiated major strikes in the oil fields at Dhahran in 1953 and ’56. In 1956, just before the general strike at Aramco, a demonstration confronted King Sa’ud’s visit to Dhahran demanding, in the words of historian Toby Matthiesen, “the removal of the American military base there and the nationalization of Aramco.” Escalating popular pressure led King Sa’ud — who was otherwise friendly to the U.S. — to eject the U.S. military base in 1962. Due to widespread anti-U.S. sentiment across the region, Saudi Arabia did not allow the U.S. to have a permanent base in the country until the 1990s (though it did allow the U.S. to have temporary forces there, as discussed below).

Gulf Allies Fuming at Israel and US After Gas Field Bombing, Report Says

This period was one of anti-colonial struggle, independence movements, and the rise of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his version of Arab nationalism — all of which spread anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist sentiments across the region. Nasser’s popularity surged after his 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal. At times, Nasser directly addressed the issue of foreign military bases in the region. In February 1964, for example, The New York Times reported that Nasser “called on Libya… to........

© Truthout