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US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.

“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.

“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.

Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.

In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.

Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.

“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”

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Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous discuss the latest developments in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran with Karim Makdisi, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut and a co-host, with his brothers, of the Makdisi Street podcast. With Hezbollah entering the war and Israel slowly moving troops into Lebanon, they discuss the spreading conflict in the context of Israel’s broader agenda in the region.

“If you go back to the question of resistance, if you go to the question of Hezbollah, I think their calculation now is to say, look, if Iran falls, we’re doomed, Hezbollah’s doomed, Lebanon is doomed,” Makdisi said. “So this is a situation where we need to enter in whatever capacity possible and support this particular attack or do whatever they can do in order to support this larger regional war, because otherwise the Israelis with the Americas are going to just pick off each of these entities one at a time in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, etc.... This is for them an existential situation, as it is in Iran.”

Attempting to weaken or overthrow Iran, they note, is a means to support Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Palestine and beyond.

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US political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had caught and “arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries”.

“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran?” Carlson said on his show. “Aren’t they on the same side?”

“Israel wants to hurt Iran - and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman and Kuwait,” he added.

Carlson also alleged that Israel deliberately sows chaos among America’s Arab allies.

The American journalist did not cite a source for the claim, which Middle East Eye could not independently verify.

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US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he’s “not happy” with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not joining the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, though he allowed US forces to use UK bases.

“I’m not happy with the UK,” Trump said during a White House meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “It’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

Trump also singled out Spain, whose left-wing government refused to let US planes use its bases for attacks and resisted NATO defense spending increases.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

The comments came as US and Israeli strikes hit targets across Tehran, marking the fourth day of the conflict.

Drones and missiles targeted Iranian oil facilities and US embassies in the Gulf, while Israel intensified operations in Lebanon against Tehran-backed Hezbollah after the militia entered the fight.

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U.S. first lady Melania Trump presided over a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday focusing on children in conflict, one of her signature issues, and acknowledged she was doing so in "challenging times" as the United States has joined Israel in attacking Iran.

"The U.S. stands with all of the children throughout the world," she said, speaking generally and not specifically about the new war in the Middle East. "I hope soon peace will be yours."

Hanging over Monday's meeting was what Iranian state media says was an airstrike that hit a girls' school in southern Iran, killing at least 165 people and wounding dozens more. The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area. The U.S. military said it was looking into the reports.

Shortly before Monday's session began, Iran's ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saeid Iravani, said it was "deeply shameful and hypocritical" for the U.S. to convene a meeting on protecting children during conflict while launching airstrikes on Iranian cities.

"For the United States, 'protecting children' and 'maintaining international peace and security' clearly mean something very different from what the U.N. Charter provides," he told reporters.

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The US justice department abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and decided it would defend executive orders made by Donald Trump to try to penalize law firms that represented clients or causes the president did not like.

On Monday, the department announced in a court filing that it was dropping its appeal against a ruling by a district court judge that blocked Trump’s retaliatory executive actions against four companies that refused to make a deal with him.

Trump’s “capitulation” was celebrated by at least two of the the companies that welcomed the DoJ’s voluntary withdrawal from the legal proceedings.

On Tuesday, however, the government filed a new, single-paragraph request to the US court of appeals for the Columbia circuit, announcing it had changed its mind, and wished “to pursue this appeal”.

It gave no reason for its sudden about-face, and quoted attorneys for the four companies who unanimously opposed “the government’s unexplained request to withdraw yesterday’s voluntary dismissal, to which all parties had agreed”.

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For some U.S. military commanders, the emerging war in Iran is part of a biblical plan to bring about the end of the world as we know it, according to complaints filed by over 100 service members.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has received a litany of complaints about religious ideology seeping into military orders since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran, independent journalist Jon Larsen first reported.

Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of MRFF, a nonprofit group established 21 years ago that focuses on ensuring constitutional protections for service members, spoke with HuffPost by phone Tuesday morning and illuminated some details of the complaints, which have come from more than three dozen military units situated in at least 30 different military installations.

“We started getting calls in the wee hours of Saturday morning from people saying their commanders were just jubilant about this and trying to tell people, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all part of God’s plan,’” Weinstein said.

Weinstein said the “metric promised” in the Bible’s Book of Revelation is horrifying and should worry everyone.
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“They are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon,” Weinstein said. “That’s a lot of blood.”

Part of what makes the accounts so disturbing, Weinstein said, is that service members aren’t able to push back when they’re given orders that blur the line regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is all about time, place and manner,” he said. “If you’re being proselytized to by your superior, you can’t say, ‘Get out of my face.’ Under the military’s criminal code of justice, insubordination is considered a felony.”

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Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) tore into Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a 10-minute tirade criticizing her from everything to her handling of the deaths of two Minnesotans to killing her own dog in a monologue that garnered applause from the audience of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I’m giving you a performance evaluation here – I’m not looking for a response,” said Tillis, adding that “time after time after time, I’ve been disappointed.”

Tillis, who is retiring at the end of his term next year, accused Noem of holding up federal emergency funding, violating U.S. citizens rights in carrying out immigration enforcement and quashing independent oversight of her department in a move he said would prompt him to renew his hold on DHS nominees.

He faulted her for indiscriminate immigration enforcement.

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