Anyone Seen What's Happening at Diego Garcia Lately?
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D.C. is abuzz with a ton of Trump-hating journalists and politicians all of a sudden learning that national security is a thing about which to be concerned. The Beltway is seizing and pouncing on a story that they believe is an opening to attack Donald Trump, or at least slow down his pace of progress in the first couple of months by slinging mud at his cabinet and senior advisors. The story doesn’t interest me in the slightest. It’s not hard to see the motivation of those now calling for resignations and firings. They’re exploiting a mistake in order to scandal the new administration into a standstill. 

What I do find of extraordinary importance is what is taking place on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean that happens to contain a very long 12,000-foot runway. 

Diego Garcia Air Force Base is a joint U.S. and U.K. base on the largest of the Chagos Islands. The Brits have controlled much of the region as part of their British Indian Ocean Territories, but in 2024, they negotiated transfer of the island to Mauritania, with the exception of a 99-year lease for the Air Base, which is now operated and used by both the Brits and the Americans. It also happens to be due south of Iran. 

In the last 72 hours, a pretty significant buildup of U.S. aerial assets have been arriving on the archipelago, and the amount of open source information thus far is something that very well might be of great consequence to the greater Middle East very soon. 





Most of those B-2’s, the bat-wing stealth bombers that will single-handedly ruin any adversary’s day if they happen to drop the types of premium ordinance they usually contain, are usually stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base about three hours west of St. Louis. There are indications that there may be as many as 7 of the B-2’s now on that island in the Indian Ocean. They’re not there for rest and recreation. 

Dan Scavino, Jr. is the deputy White House chief of staff. He also put this up on his X feed on Tuesday.

Kinda random until you begin to realize the rest of the buildup that’s taking place. The head of the snake behind the violence plaguing the Middle East since 1979 has been the Islamic Republic of Iran, which the Late Christopher Hitchens used to say is a lie in three parts. It is not Islamic. The clerics in Tehran follow a radical Shia version of Islam that revolves around a supposed Hidden Imam. It is not a republic. The shell of a government does not rule the country independently. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei picks all of the nominees that will run in “elections”, and whoever wins the presidency ultimately answers to Khamenei. It is a fanatical theocracy. And it is not Iran, at least not historically. It is Persia. 

Virtually every terrorist group in the region you can name is funded, armed, trained, and controlled by Tehran. Whether it’s Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, or its little cousin Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis in Yemen, Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, one of three or four terror groups that evolved after the U.S. departed Baghdad, and about half a dozen groups in what’s left of Syria, all of the instability, and I mean all of it in the Middle East leads to one person – Khamenei. 

Almost 18 years ago, GOP presidential hopeful John McCain joked about bombing Iran, singing a parody of the Beach Boys’ classic, Barbara Ann. Every president since has played footsies with Iran – sometimes ignoring them, other times making a deal, believing that giving them money that was previously sanctioned in return for pinky swearing they wouldn’t continue their quest for a nuclear weapon would bring peace. It didn’t. 

Donald Trump was the first president since Ronald Reagan to give the Iranians, and their proxies, pause after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. But then Joe Biden freed up all the money Trump sanctioned, pouring gasoline, and rockets, missiles, and drones all over the region, leading to the October 7th holocaust on Israel by Hamas in 2023. 

Now that Donald Trump is back in office, having talked to hostages in which he facilitated their release from the Hamas tunnels, he has seen enough. He gave Hamas an ultimatum to release the remaining hostages immediately, or all hell would break loose. They didn’t, and Israel eventually began raining hell down on the Gaza Strip once it became clear the ceasefire was no longer working. 

Hezbollah has been effectively dismantled by Israel. Bashar al-Assad is no longer running Syria, and that country is now a failed state with all sorts of factions vying for control. Last week, the sustained campaign against the Houthis by the United States began in earnest, with the message to Iran being very, very clear. 





Iran has chosen no deal, Howie.  On St. Patrick’s Day, Trump seemingly gave Iran one more final warning. 

It’s a week later, and Iran has not heeded the warning. They floated video of short and medium-range missiles, presumably underground somewhere, as a tacit warning back to the U.S. to back off. Which brings us back to Diego Garcia. 

Again, I’m not Jeffrey Goldberg. All of this is open source information that D.C. journos don’t seem to want to cover. 

Two carrier task groups have been dispatched to the region. This buildup, especially with the refueling tankers, is not something that indicates whatever is coming is a one-off. This is what you would see if you were planning on being there a while with a plan to rearrange the landscape of a country. The buildup is not for Yemen, because the Houthis are being eradicated pretty efficiently from assets in the Red Sea. 

So why all this firepower in this particular location? There really can be only two explanations, and neither one of them is very good for Iran. One is that Donald Trump is on his last nerve with Khamenei, and has ordered the staging in order to bring the promised hell to them and end this nuisance once and for all. The other is to make Tehran think they’re about to be hit, hoping they will blink, roll over, and give up the keys to their nuclear program. 

Iran once was thought to be an ominous proposition to handle, militarily speaking, inside their borders. They have an alliance with Russia and China, and until recently defended their airspace with Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries. Except last October 30th, Israel did us the good favor of destroying those batteries, leaving Iran defenseless from the air. 

The possible targeting, were hell to come visit Iran, could be small, and it could be large, or it could be a mixture. They have lots of oil, but very limited refining capacity. Would be a shame if something happened to their refinery. Their electrical grid is shaky. Would be a pity if the country looked like North Korea at night. Their nuclear program’s key ingredients, centrifuges believed to be buried under mountains which would be formidable to most nations, are complicated but not out of reach to U.S. bunker busters that can be used as pile drivers of destruction with successive drops in the same location. 

Sure, focus on the non-story D.C. thinks will claim a scalp or two out of the Trump administration. It won’t, and in reality, it’s not that big a story. I’m following the Middle East very closely, because we just might be on the cusp of a new age in the region. Peace could break out all over if the monster is finally taken on and defeated. 

What is escalating right now in the Indian Ocean could give Ayatollah Khamenei, if he survives the next couple weeks, the same feeling Robert Hays had in Airplane! about Macho Grande. Khamenei may never get over Diego Garcia. 

Closing question. If and when it’s showtime and all those air assets begin a long overdue campaign in Iran, who will be the first anti-Trump voice, whether it’s a Democrat, media type, or Never Trumper, to look past all of the history leading up to this confrontation and claim it’s a Wag the Dog scenario to move the Signal story to the sidelines? You know that’s going to be the Beltway spin. The New York-D.C. anti-Trump bubble denizens are nothing if not predictable. 










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