Gulf consultations before the Iran war describes what John Kiriakou found — and did not find — in the Persian Gulf in the weeks before the 2026 American strikes on Iran.
The trips
Kiriakou was in the Gulf a week before recording, and again three weeks before that, travelling in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha. He describes having spent a good part of his adult life in the Persian Gulf while serving in the CIA, and having close relations with the royal families there.[1]
The missing case
His central observation is a contrast with 2003. When George W. Bush wanted war with Iraq, American diplomats went out all over the world to make the case and the president crisscrossed the country to win over the American people. Before the Iran strikes, “nothing” — nobody went out to the Gulf to explain the problem or the intention at all.[2]
The consequence was that Gulf officials were reduced to asking Kiriakou, as though he were an insider, what the United States was going to do.[2]
What he told them
Kiriakou told a senior royal in the United Arab Emirates that in his experience the United States would not send two aircraft carrier strike forces — two carrier battle groups with twelve associated ships each — unless it meant to do serious damage, and that he thought an attack was coming.[3] He adds that the Gulf states were all worried.[4]
What the consultations did not buy them
By the third day of the war the states Kiriakou had been talking to were the ones being hit. Iranian fire, he says, was aimed at American military installations inside the Gulf Cooperation Council countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — rather than at their civilians or governments, but the air defences firing back were theirs.[5][6]
The figures he had been given were stark: the United Arab Emirates with seven days of surface-to-air missiles remaining and Qatar with four, both appealing urgently to Washington for replacements, “and there are no replacements. So something’s got to give.”[7][5]
Watching it from the other side
The timing of the trip put Kiriakou in the position of narrating the closure of airports he had used days earlier. On the first morning of the war he read the list: “The airports in um in Kuwait, Dhahran, Bahrain, [Qatar], Abu Dhabi, and Dubai are all closed. No flights in or out.”[8]
His own reaction was personal rather than analytical: “I was just there a week ago. I just can’t can’t believe it.”[8]
Later in the same broadcast, as reports came in of a strike in the Palm district of Dubai and an attack on Kuwait International Airport, he gave the itinerary more precisely — “I just flew in and out of Kuwait 3 weeks ago. Flew in and out of Dubai a week ago” — and said he was going to text a friend in Dubai as it happened.[9][10]