Marco Rubio, and Misdirection in the Middle East

One of the few advantages of having a Vietnam vet father with PTSD was that I spent a lot of time in bars as a kid. Stay with me here…..Not the shiny 2025 Lower East Side joints with signature cocktails and DJs spinning curated playlists. I mean old man bars from the ’70s—low ceilings, jukeboxes, sticky floors, walls stained yellow from smoke and time. Remember smoking in bars?

These were places where veterans played liar’s poker with a ten-dollar bill and a straight face.

The games weren’t really about money. They were about nerves. Bluffing. Reading. I watched grown men lie to each other with absolute conviction, fully aware they were being lied to in return. And I watched them nod, smirk, fold, and order another round.

You learn things in corners like that. You learn to read a face before it moves. You learn that tone often tells you more than words. You learn the sound a lie makes when it’s spoken like truth.

I’m convinced that’s what made me a good investor. I could tell the difference between a CEO who was a bullshit artist and one who was an honest broker.

And it’s the same kind of bluff I heard, clear as day, when Marco Rubio—on Face the Nation, with all the calm authority of a man who’s never had to win a bar fight—said that the reason we have military bases across the Middle East is “because of Iran.”

A bluff.

Here’s what he said, word for word:

Margaret Brennan: There are personnel throughout the Middle East from the United States in Bahrain, in Kuwait, and other bases. If those countries are attacked by Iran because of their association with the United States, will the United States defend them?

Rubio: Well, that's exactly why they're there. That's a great point, actually. Do you know why we have bases in Bahrain, and Qatar, and UAE, and all these places? All of those bases are there because those countries are afraid that Iran will attack them. If Iran was not a threat to the region—if the Iranian regime—because I'm not talking about the Iranian people—the regime—was not a threat to the region, we wouldn't have to have any of these bases. Those bases are there because those countries are petrified that these—that the Iranian Shia clerics that run that country will attack their countries. As you know, they've got a very difficult history... well, that's why we're there.

Not just because it’s false—though it is. Iran is one player on a crowded board. But to pretend it’s the reason—the sole justification—is to play the public like a mark who’s never seen the cards dealt.

This isn’t strategy. It’s storytelling. And not the good kind.

The reality is tangled. U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf long predate Iran’s current military posture. Their lineage runs through post–World War II oil policy, Cold War containment, and the desert architecture of the 1991 Gulf War. Iran is a reason—not the reason. To frame it as the central premise isn’t analysis. It’s marketing. It sells a narrative that suggests regime change in Tehran would trigger a clean American exit from the region.

That’s fantasy.

Those bases support more than deterrence. They serve logistics, force projection, arms deals, surveillance. We’re not visiting—we’re embedded. Iran might color the threat environment, but it doesn’t define the infrastructure. Pretending otherwise isn’t just inaccurate—it’s convenient.

And this isn’t a new tactic. The broader misdirection—the narrative calibration, the emphasis on singular villains—is a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy, long predating the current Rubio talking points. It echoes through the Trump era, where complexity gets shaved down to fit a slogan.

And like all effective lies, it clings to a speck of truth.

Rubio keeps calling Operation Midnight Hammer “precise,” “brilliant,” and “limited in scope.” But when asked to define the intelligence behind the strike, he dodges. He waves off questions about Khamenei’s alleged order to weaponize as “irrelevant.” That rhetorical sidestep serves two purposes: it avoids accountability, and it licenses escalation.

It’s a classic sleight-of-hand: assert the clarity of threat while blurring the evidence behind it.

Rubio also insists, more than once, “this is not about regime change.” And yet every sentence he speaks paints the Iranian regime as irredeemable. That contradiction is resolved with a familiar political shrug:

“That’s up to the Iranian people.”

That’s not restraint. That’s rhetorical laundering. It gives Washington license to apply pressure—economic, military, psychological—while feigning detachment. It sanitizes policy for public consumption.

But that’s the danger. Because this kind of narrative doesn’t just mislead. It miscalculates. It paves the road to escalation while pretending it was never a choice at all. It teaches the public to view war as a natural event—like a storm, or gravity—instead of a policy outcome decided in closed rooms with flickering monitors and filtered briefings.

And maybe Rubio knows that. Maybe he doesn’t.

But I’ve seen enough men bluff with a bad hand to recognize the move.

In those bars, the tells weren’t always in the cards—they were in the eyes, the breath, the slight pause before the lie.

Maybe it hits harder for me, because I’ve watched this bluff play out before. Maybe because I know what it costs when the truth comes too late.

So whether Rubio believes it or not almost doesn’t matter. Belief doesn’t shield us from consequence. And the bluff still plays, until the next generation walks into another war we told ourselves would be the last.