Earlier this year I was talking to a journalist based in the Middle East, and he asked me a question - why hasn’t Iran bombed the Jebel Ali Power and Desalination Complex in Dubai? Without it, he said, there would be “no Dubai”, because the emirate would suffer a catastrophic collapse in its water supply.
He’s not wrong, and Dubai isn’t the only place that is vulnerable. Desalination - the process of turning seawater into drinking water - is how most of the countries that Iran is attacking around the Persian Gulf stay hydrated. The precise amount varies, but generally about 70%+ of the drinking water in various countries comes from desalination. In Dubai, it’s 98% - from Jebel Ali alone.
In the first phase of fighting between Iran and the U.S., desalination plants were mostly left alone. But since fighting ticked up again a week or so ago, Iran has been flirting with doing major damage to them. The countries Iran is attacking tend to stay pretty quiet about what exactly Iran hits and how badly, but Tehran has definitely targeted water facilities in Kuwait and perhaps elsewhere over the past week.
The first phase of fighting basically ended because Trump was too scared to risk this happening. When Trump famously threatened to wipe out Iran’s civilization, the ironic thing was that it was Iran which had a real civilization-ending card up its sleeve. If it rains enough missiles and drones down on desalination facilities, it can basically end life in the Gulf states as we know it. This surely factored into Trump blinking and pivoting to diplomacy (well, to Jared Kushner playing at doing diplomacy).
So is Iran going to do it?
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