The US needs to relocate its bases in the Gulf to Israel and neighbouring countries to better protect its assets from Iran’s missiles and drones, the former head of US Central Command (Centcom), General Frank McKenzie, said at a webinar last week.
“No one in their right mind would ever put the Centcom forward headquarters, you know, 100 miles away from Iran, [in Qatar], yet that’s where it is,” he told the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, referring to al-Udeid military base.
McKenzie, who was the top military official overseeing US forces in the Middle East from 28 March 2019 to 1 April 2022, said that in 2022, he and other officials told the Biden administration that the constellation of US bases around the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain was vulnerable to Iranian attacks and US forces should be dispersed to the West, including to Israel.
“We proposed to [the] then Biden administration that we consider moving bases to the West to include Israel, to include Egypt…places we might flush to the West if we get into a fight with Iran,” he said, adding that the Biden administration “aggressively” shut down the idea.
McKenzie said that the current US basing system in the Middle East has become an “artefact”, describing it as a legacy of the Cold War, when the US was concerned about a potential Soviet Union invasion of the oil-rich Arab Gulf states and later, the counter-insurgencies the US waged in Iraq and Afghanistan.
