America's Net Security Provider Myth Has Been Busted by the Iran War: Point of View

UPDATED: Mar 11, 2026 14:49 IST

When girls aged between 7 and 12 filed into the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran on the morning of 28 February, they carried books rather than any awareness that they were walking into what would become the defining atrocity of the Iranian war. The Good Tree school, as it is known locally, was full of young pupils on a regular Saturday morning when missiles struck, the roof collapsed, and 165 people were killed before rescue workers could reach them. Excavators dug a hundred graves in rows, most of them for children.

The question of who fired the missile has been answered by the evidence itself, even if Washington has preferred to look away from that answer. Investigators at Bellingcat identified the weapon as a Tomahawk cruise missile, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, confirmed at a press conference that the first weapons fired at sea during the conflict were Tomahawks unleashed by the United States Navy. The Defence Department published photographs of the USS Spruance firing a Tomahawk on the very day of the school strike, and a U.S. early assessment concluded that America was likely responsible. Some will note that the school sat near an IRGC military complex, and it did, but it had been walled off and functioning as a purely civilian institution for over a decade. Proximity is not a justification. Under international humanitarian law, it is a war crime.

Then Donald Trump stepped before the press and suggested Iran may have bombed its own school. Three claims followed in quick succession: that a Tomahawk is very generic, that Iran also has Tomahawks, and that the matter is being investigated. All three collapse under even basic scrutiny. The Tomahawk is manufactured by a single company, Raytheon, in the United States, and has been sold to exactly four countries in its entire operational history, the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands and Japan. Of those four, the UK alone has a proven combat deployment record, Australia and the Netherlands have only test-fired the missile, and Japan's order has not even been delivered. Independent analysis confirmed that Iran has never acquired, captured or operated a single Tomahawk, a point so obvious that even Fox News observed the President likely knows it. His own Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing beside Trump on Air Force One, refused to repeat the claim, and as a reporter noted in that same press conference, Trump was the only person in his entire government saying it.

The lie matters, but what it reveals matters far more. It happened in a region where Washington has spent five decades assuring Arab nations that American military bases exist for their protection, that the presence of U.S. forces in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE is a guarantee of their safety and sovereignty. Gulf kingdoms contribute roughly 60 per cent of the running costs of those bases, around 650 million dollars annually, effectively paying for the privilege of hosting launchpads that were used to start a war they had no part in deciding. When America struck Iran, Iran retaliated against Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan and the UAE, closing airspace and targeting cities in countries that had been given no voice in the decision that brought fire to their doorstep.

Colonel Rajeev Agarwal, West Asia expert at the Chintan Research Foundation in Delhi, delivered the verdict plainly in The Hindu. America's security guarantees have proved illusory, ineffective and unreliable, and Gulf states can no longer count on American assurances for their future safety. Reports already suggest that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar are exploring options to remove American bases from their soil entirely, a shift that Colonel Agarwal describes as potentially the most transformative change in regional security architecture in half a century. His conclusion carries the weight of everything this war has demonstrated. security cannot be bought or outsourced. Those bases were never truly about Arab security. The strikes on Iran were coordinated by Qatar, fired from destroyers in the Arabian Sea and launched from Al Dhafra in the UAE, all of them aimed at eliminating Iran's nuclear capability, which posed no credible threat to Kuwait, Qatar or Bahrain. It was a threat to Israel, and the Arab world paid for sovereign territory, at security risk and for Iranian missiles over their own cities for a war fought entirely on someone else's behalf.

The net security provider myth has underpinned American foreign policy in this region since the 1970s, justifying the bases, the arms sales and the diplomatic cover extended across Iraq, Gaza and now Iran. But in the rubble of a girls' school in Minab, that myth no longer holds. It lies buried in rows alongside its victims, and when the most powerful military in human history fires a Tomahawk and tells the world that perhaps the target did it to itself, that is not the fog of war. That is the myth, finally and unmistakably, coming apart.

- Ends

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