Rain Check
A fascinating journey down a war propaganda rabbit hole.
“Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.” – Dwight Morrow
Shortly after missiles started flying over the Middle East in the latest forever war, a most unusual set of weather phenomena captured the attention of residents across the region. In late March, a rare, slow-moving storm system brought heavy rain, thunderstorms, and strong winds across much of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In April, Saudi Arabia closed schools after severe floods raged across the country. Last week, reports of previously empty Iranian dams now overflowing with water filled social media. A post on Twitter/X that purports to show torrents of water filling various reservoirs across the region has 3.5 million views at the time of this writing.
Iranian officials have long accused Gulf states and US-Israeli military interests of cloud “theft” or weather manipulation. Many assumed this claim was an attempt to deflect political blame for the government’s alleged mishandling of the years-long drought that has besieged the country. Iran’s gripe is not without at least some plausibility, however. The UAE has publicly acknowledged its program to increase domestic rainfall, which involves an estimated 1,000 hours of cloud-seeding flights per year. The US military is also known to have used cloud seeding as part of a systematic “weather warfare” campaign in Vietnam during Operation Popeye more than 50 years ago.
Escalating the conspiracy speculation, perhaps knowingly, Iran’s official Kabul Embassy Twitter/X account, part of a cadre of verified, longstanding embassy accounts reactivated to spread wartime propaganda, tossed a match into this online tinderbox of intrigue. As Türkiye Today describes, the Iranians assert that their successful attack against a weather control center accounts for the sudden restoration of water to their lands:
“The since-deleted post stated that following what it described as Iran’s destruction of a ‘secret cloud seeding and climate change center’ operated by the UAE, weather patterns across the region transformed ‘overnight.’ Iraq and Iran, the post claimed, were now experiencing weekly heavy precipitation and significant temperature drops as a direct consequence.
In a rhetorical flourish that drew particular attention before the post disappeared, the account included a meteorological map based on the GFS forecasting model showing dense precipitation systems stretching from Türkiye’s western and southern coastlines across to the Middle East. A red circle was drawn around rain masses passing over Syria and Iraq. The account described the cloud formations on the map as curving in the style of legendary Brazilian footballer Ronaldo Nazario, a comparison that amplified the post’s viral spread for its surreal tone.”
While such speculation could be easily dismissed as just another artifact of social-media algorithm amplification, meaningful signals are exposed as the tide goes out: the critical role water plays in regional geopolitics, the mystique surrounding Western intelligence agencies and their rumored prowess, and how Iran is more than holding its own against the US and Israel in the propaganda arc of the current war. Let’s drink it in.