Addressing an audience of military veterans in Alexandria, Virginia, last week, US Navy Admiral William Raven, formerly head of the elite Seals special forces unit, spoke of President Trump: “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world’s stage, and worst of all divided us as a nation.”
All rather redolent of an Aaron Sorkin script reaching a redemptive climax, and perhaps a little too confessional for our costive, cis-Atlantic tastes. It was also inaccurate in one respect: The USA was divided long before Trump began his Long March to the White House. But where Raven was right was his criticism of Trump’s private war with Iran, unauthorised by Congress. This is precisely the kind of superman-adventurism that Trump repeatedly denounced on the campaign trail, as did [his now almost invisible] Vice President JD Vance. The latter now has the peculiar pleasure of contemplating his former colleagues in the US Marine Corps sailing towards war in the Indian Ocean. Apparently, the newly-named Secretary for War, the extraordinarily unpleasant and pretty bloody stupid “Pete” Hegseth, only realised the other day that a strait alongside a hostile shore is no longer a navigable passage of water but a nautical death trap. Three words hover over all such projects: “The Dardanelles strait”, as Britain’s First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher gloomily observed in 1915, “will be the death of us.”
They certainly were for an entire British Imperial Army. This is not to say that the US Marine Corps’ expeditionary force is facing such a fate. I have no idea what lies ahead: If only Churchill, the irrepressible architect of the homicidal folly that is more commonly known as “Gallipoli”, had possessed such modesty. And likewise, Hegseth, who has already secured a place in the Dictionary of Barbaric Quotations with his joyous observations about the US punching Iranians, “when they are down, which is exactly how it should be”.
Lovely stuff. Does this include the Tomahawk attack on Sjajarah Tabbyyebeh school, killing 170 people, including one hundred little schoolgirls? Yes, it’s available on line already, the haunting image of this war: A satellite photograph of a century of little girls’ coffins beside their open, clayly-beckoning graves…
As for the US Marines, I’ve spent many a happy hour in their company, perhaps the finest fighting force answerable to an accountable democracy anywhere, and I’ve never heard any of them utter such brainless braggadocio about punching anyone when they’re down. The Corps talks softly and fights hard. However, they bitterly resent losing men for no cause, as they did in Beirut to Shia paramilitaries in 1983: Not just the 241 men killed in the infamous suicide barrack-bombing, but also in the now-forgotten daily sniper-attacks. That was then: Something similarly and sinisterly Shia possibly awaits them in Iran. Who knows? I certainly don’t. But it looks as if Trump seeks to add his own military triumphs to the glorious catalogue of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, with similar objectives, i.e., none whatever.
The locus for this, the Strait of Hormuz is often – and accurately – likened to a choke-point for sea-traffic. But it’s also like a vital body-node, which will rapidly distribute malignant metastasis via subordinate nodes throughout its entire host. One tumour being gleefully spread via the Hormuz node emanated from Vladimir Putin who upon seeing the rocketing rise of oil-prices, chuckled Stalinistically: “…perhaps it’s more advantageous for us to stop supplying the European market.”
Quite so, Vlad, and perhaps not quite what Trump intended when he began this little caper. Other consequences now shuffle along in a long queue towards possible and quite needless disaster: Economic ones such as the twin joys of global inflation and recession, which could propel much of the world to ruin. Then there are those on-word geo-military titles, each a code for complex internal myriads of potentially lethal consequences, namely Ukraine, Taiwan, Korea, plus the over-populated debt-mountain that is Africa, endlessly teetering on the brink of a continent-wide famine. Then there’s South America…but no, no, let’s not.
Such fun contemplating global chaos, poverty and war! Over the past few years, I’ve been one of the few Trump supporters in Ireland. Wonder why? In part because of his opponents, such as Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister who over the weekend solipsistically observed in the online publication, UnHerd…
Once again, I find myself caught in the conundrum of opposing an illegal war unleashed by the United States and its allies on a country whose regime I vehemently oppose. It is a thankless burden but one that Western Leftists have a duty to shoulder, lest we legitimise the regimes we oppose, both in the country being bombed and in the West.
And..
Our job, as Western Leftists, is to act upon our governments to stop the bombing. To end the sanctions that starve the poor and enrich the regime’s smugglers… Then, and only then, can the Iranian people, exercising their own immense power, reclaim their future from both the theocrats and their imperial enablers.
And ..
(The path to peace) runs through the defeat of the very powers that have spent 70 years ensuring Iran can never know peace or democracy.
Yanis, you’re a humble scribbler like me, and our mere words “legitimise” nothing. Still, I’m always happy to hear of thankless burdens being borne by self-proclaimed leftists, a term that pre-supposes intrinsic moral virtue, unlike this column, which, I’m happy to say, is as virtue-free as a jellyfish with rabies. For elucidation, what pray is the moral virtue of a declaration that a nuclear-armed Iran should never face sanctions? Yanis, I can tell you as you gallantly totter beneath those thankless burdens of yours, that an Iran with nukes is a recipe for war with Israel. Jerusalem will do whatever’s necessary to prevent another genocide. These extremes might well have included killing its own Mossad agents in Evin prison, amongst the 100 victims of an Israeli air-force strike in Iran last June, following their earlier capture by the internal intelligence agency, what used to be called Savama – Sazman-E Ettela’at Va Amniat-E Melli-E Iran. Better instant death courtesy of an F-15E than lingeringly on Savama’s torture-rack.
Declarations like “Then, and only then…” as well as sounding like an undergraduate manifesto, are also the standard lefty-way of avoiding humble workaday solutions until a socialist paradise is in the offing, as does the wish for the defeat – yes, defeat no less – of the “imperial enablers”, presumably, the UK and the US.
Quite a large prospectus there, Yanis. Whereas I’d just settle for the US fleet turning around, the bombing to cease, and boring old peace-talks to resume for the next decade or so with the absolute and unconditional certainty that Israeli bombers will return at the least sign of any renewal of the nuclear-projects, and yes, without any more moralising about thankless burdens, et cetera.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Dollars and the old clerical flaws: does Leo XIV have questions to answer?