Bombing the Omanis
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Bombing the Omanis is the point at which John Kiriakou judges Iran's conduct of the 2026 war to have become self-defeating. The question put to him was why Iran was bombing all the Gulf countries at all, given that those countries are not admirers of Israel.

The counterfactual

Kiriakou answered from recent first-hand contact. "The Gulf countries, I mean, I was just there in the Gulf and we talked about this. They would have they would have very nervously just sat the whole thing out, right? This is between the Americans the Americans, the Israelis, and the Iranians."

The position he ascribes to the Gulf governments is not sympathy for Iran but a wish to be left out, nervous neutrality in a war between three other parties.

What ended it

The list of what Iran did instead runs from the commercial to the diplomatic. "But you know, when you're blowing up hotels in Dubai or the airport the civilian airport in Manama and in Kuwait and you're bombing of all people the the peace-loving Omanis who have been trying to broker peace between the two sides, okay, then you've made a lot of enemies that you really didn't need to make."

The phrase "of all people" carries the argument. Oman was not merely uninvolved; it was the state actively working to end the war.

Consistency with his other judgements

The verdict fits Kiriakou's general reading of the Iranian campaign, which he treats as improvised and economically aimed rather than strategically directed: strikes on famous hotels chosen to empty the Gulf of visitors, driven by intelligence he rates as poor, "because it's the best they can do."

It also fits his account of the states themselves. The Gulf monarchies host the American military everywhere, the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the largest American air base in Qatar, army bases in Kuwait and the Emirates, and, as he puts it, "there's no love of Iran in these countries." None of them, in his view, would have lifted a finger for Tehran in any case; the bombing simply converted indifference into hostility.

See also

- Iranian strikes on Gulf hotels
- Why the UAE was targeted
- Dubai as Iran's window
- The Fifth Fleet in Bahrain
