Ben Rhodes

Believe it or not, John, the Pete Hexeth Department of War has not been transparent with you about the extent of damage that has been done.

Wait, what?

Hold on.

Yeah.

I know it's hard to believe.

Ben, what?

I know.

I know.

It's shocking.

The reality is that the damage done to US facilities, military bases, and diplomatic facilities across the Gulf, and I think to these Gulf countries, is much worse than we know.

We're not being given accurate battle damage assessments from the Pentagon about our facilities.

And the fact that these countries won't allow

people to even post pictures of what's gone on there, tells you something about the fact that a lot of those Iranian drones and some of those Iranian missiles got through.

And we're talking on order of billions and billions of dollars of repairs that are going to be needed, but also incalculable damage to their economies.

Because just take Qatar, the liquid natural gas field that is the biggest in the world.

Iran bombed that gas field that Qatar uses, took it offline.

That's going to take years to get that up and running, the entire infrastructure of it, in a scenario where the war ends.

And because that's offline, not only is Qatar taking an economic hit, but there are people in the UK that are sliding into poverty because they're dependent on that gas for power.

I mean, you know, they, they do not like to get directly into conflict with a country like Iran for a number of reasons.

If you're, if you're sitting in Saudi Arabia one of which is just, yeah, like they, their, their militaries are kind of designed to be plugged into ours to kind of work off of our military and,