Best Podcasts on Middle East Water Wars

“You have destroyed all of your alliances. You have not been able to defeat Iran. Iran just picked its new Ayatollah. They showed that they could have this transition of power. And sure, the United States and Israel, you're hitting Iran hard. You're blowing up oil depots and desalination posts. But Iran's like, well, we'll strike back also. We'll hit the desalination posts of Bahrain and some of the Middle East neighbors.”

“It's just so utterly despicable that we have a regime that lies about literally everything. And Donald Trump says that if Iran chooses the next Ayatollah without consulting Donald Trump, he said the new one won't last long. They must consult me. I must be the one who picks the Ayatollah for them. They don't want you to pick their Ayatollah, Donald. And if you look at what's going on in Iran right now, I mean, look at how it actually visually looks. Black rain, nuclear winter essentially is descending on Iran.”

“Those desalinization plants are basically the lifeblood for the citizens of those Arab countries. I mean, remember, this is a giant desert we're talking about, yet they have these magnificent cities they've built in the middle of these harsh environments, and that's because of desalinization. And once you pop open those tanks, they're not coming back online for a while. So that means, as you noted, you better start filling up your bathtubs now, because now we're talking about water shortages.”

“Iran's behavior, so they fired missiles and sent drones and had attacks at almost every single Arab country all throughout the Middle East. So they've attacked Saudi Arabia, they've attacked UAE, they've attacked Kuwait, they've attacked Qatar, they've attacked Bahrain, they've attacked Jordan. And we've seen statements from many of those other Middle Eastern countries, mostly Arab countries, expressing, condemning Iran's response.”

“This to me, Pat, is Iran is crossing a line into hitting civilian infrastructure. And I think we need to understand just how big of a line this is that they're crossing with the Arab neighbors. It's like crippling Bahrain's ability and it's a partial damage. It was partially damaged. So they say it's still working and repairs are underway. But good Lord, you're hitting the water source for a small Arab nation.”

“This strike on the water desalination plant and the closure of the Straits of Hormuz literally is a choke point for every single person who lives in the Gulf. Because think about it. Everyone talks about the Straits of Hormuz just for oil. But remember, they have huge food. All their food comes in from there. Everything. If you've ever been to these countries, everything is imported.”

“Iran does not need to win the war. They just need to make it expensive enough so that the Americans, and I'm talking about the man on the street Americans, Caddy, demand an exit. And that's basically where we are right now. Unless you're telling me that I have this analysis wrong and Trump has this unbelievable idea that he's kind of come down like he did from Mount Evo with the orange tablets for the tariffs.”

“In between, Trump comes with his truth social. And as you see there, he insults Iran, he humiliates Iran, and then he says that Iran will be hit very hard today. And only a short period after that, the United States hits the desalination plant in Reshm Island, which is a major, major escalation. It's also a violation of Article 54 of the Geneva Conventions Protocol 1.”

“Iran continues to strike its neighbors. Strikes continue to rain down on Israel and Tel Aviv and surrounding cities there... And as a result of the United States and Israel striking at desalination, water purifying areas in Iran, Iran is hitting desalination areas in the Middle East, like one in Bahrain right now. And without water, The Middle East basically is essentially dead, and that is further fueling major crises right there.”

“If you have a civil conflict inside of Iran, the economy is already in really deep trouble because of, you know, U.S. sanctions, a collapse in currency, so there's extreme poverty there. There are ethnic separatist movements inside of Iran and the Kurdish regions and the Baluk regions. And so what you could have is an implosion, you know, if there's some kind of uprising and then there's a kind of chaotic civil war, which is not hard to imagine because we've seen that in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, the other places where the U.S. has been involved militarily.”

“Iran was in realistic danger of becoming a failed state because of the sheer lack of water. That is an existential threat. When your capital city is running out of water, there's no other way to look at that kind of scale of problem. And the fact that now they're dealing with this massacre of the people who had been running things as well as mass destruction via the air of a lot of civil infrastructure, this is just so much more of a problem.”

“As Murtaza Hussein explains, they're relentlessly trying to encourage Iran to hit the Gulf states more directly to force their direct engagement in the war. This includes release of images yesterday by CENTCOM of the HIMARS rockets apparently being fired from Arab states. So the U.S. is also leaking images of Arab states firing these missiles in order to try to draw in the Arab states into the war.”

“Now that these areas are being so frequently struck and hit by Iran, the veneer of safety is is absolutely shattered. So Donald Trump really screwed over all of these individuals who sought to bribe him. Right. All the quid pro quo deals, all the money they threw at Donald Trump personally. And just like his investors in the casinos and his note holders and the people who did business with him his entire life. Trump screwed you over.”