ACTING US Navy Secretary Hung Cao has admitted that Iranian forces ‘blew the hell’ out of the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, a rare on-the-record admission that the Pentagon’s flagship naval hub in West Asia was shattered by the Islamic Republic’s retaliatory strikes.
Cao made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times reporter Ryan Morgan, who published the comments on Thursday.
Morgan wrote that the acting secretary’s language was the first direct high-level US acknowledgment of the scale of the blow.
Fox News Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin called it a ‘pretty stunning admission,’ noting that no senior American official had previously said as much on the record.
Cao’s nomination to become the full-time Navy secretary remains stalled in the Senate.
The acting secretary said the destruction left the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with ‘no place for them to pull in’.
Asked whether the US Navy would have to return to Bahrain to sustain high-intensity deployments of that kind, Cao replied only that ‘I have a task force that’s looking at that’.
The US Navy’s top uniformed officer, Admiral. Daryl Caudle, said earlier this month that the service would not go back to the Bahrain base ‘anytime soon’.
The USS Abraham Lincoln spent nearly nine months at sea, including about 200 days in a combat zone, before making its first port call in Thailand this month amid reports of poor conditions and low morale on board. Supply lines have been stretched as far as Diego Garcia because the Fifth Fleet’s home port is no longer usable.
The admission cuts against months of official American messaging. Washington had claimed that Iranian strikes on the base did not ‘significantly impact operations’.
Satellite imagery and later reporting told a different story that the Fifth Fleet headquarters building was rendered unusable, at least a dozen other structures and two satellite communications terminals were hit, and repair estimates ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Families were evacuated. Some 1,500 sailors were pulled out of Bahrain after the opening days of the war.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) announced repeated missile and drone attacks on the Fifth Fleet compound at Mina Salman and related facilities, saying command buildings, air-defence systems, drone storage, support equipment and fuel tanks were among the targets. Tehran has insisted throughout that bases used to attack the Islamic Republic are not sanctuaries.
The contrast with White House claims that Iran’s attack capabilities had been all but destroyed is now being drawn even in US media.
The US military is considering reducing its presence across West Asia after months of Iranian missile and drone strikes inflicted heavy damage on American bases.
The crisis of US imperialism will no doubt affect the TUC Congress, taking place in the next few days.
World capitalism is heading from one disaster to another. The issue is not to waste time musing how it could have possibly got itself into such a crisis.
Now is the time to take advantage of the crisis by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to bring down this Labour government which supports and struggles to sustain British capitalism.
An emergency resolution must be put forward at the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Labour regime and bring in a Workers Government.
British capitalism is now on its knees. This is the time to go bring it down and to go forward to socialism and a nationalised and planned economy.
There will never be a better time for a massive working class action to bring in a Workers Government and Socialism and bring an end to these imperialist wars once and for all.
