The Abraham Lincoln off Oman refers to the American carrier battle group John Kiriakou located in the Arabian Sea on 26 January 2026, and to the assessment he attached to it. Asked for an update on Iran, he began with the disposition and then with an admission of fear.
The disposition
“The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier battle group is in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman. I genuinely fear what’s going to happen in the coming weeks. I really do.”[1]
He framed the timing as convenient for the administration on two counts — a distraction from the killing in Minneapolis, and from the Epstein files, “which everybody forgot existed.” His view of that convenience was not that it was incidental: “and that was the plan.”[2]
The assumption he rejects
The substantive part of the assessment concerns what he believes Washington and Jerusalem expect to happen. “I think that the Israelis and the Americans genuinely smell blood in the water, and they believe — rightly or wrongly — that all the Iranian government needs is a gentle shove to collapse upon itself. That’s not going to be the case.”[2]
His reason is institutional rather than sentimental. “There are 150,000 members of the IRGC, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. They are the backbone of Iranian national security.”[3]
What he expects instead
Kiriakou’s prediction is that an attack produces the opposite of the intended political effect. “If the Israelis and the Americans think that once they give Iran this little shove that people are going to rise up and overthrow the regime — that is not real life. We’re going to be seen as invaders and attackers, and it’s going to unite Iranians against us, and unite them against their Israeli attackers.”[3]
His closing line on the subject was four words: “Nothing good’s going to come of this.” Pressed again later in the same programme by a viewer asking about the drumbeat to war, he did not expand the argument, only repeated the feeling behind it — “I’m genuinely worried. I really am.”[3][4]
The reasoning is the same one he has applied to Iraq and to Venezuela: that bombing a population does not turn it against its own government, and that the belief it will is the single most durable error in American planning.