For those old enough to remember the post 9/11 period and the early years of the so-called global war on terror, this past week has been like an acid flashback.
Back then it would have been hard to believe that there would be a bigger gang of idiots in office than that led by W. Bush, but the Yankees managed to pull it off. Never underestimate our southern neighbour’s capacity for brutish stupidity.
The photos of Tehran, a city with roughly the same population as the province of Quebec, having its skyline blotted out with oily smoke is a vision of hell on earth. Perhaps the only image more sickening is the booze-bag TV-host-turned-Pentagon-chief Hegseth gloating about the damage U.S. troops have inflicted.
This is a war perpetrated by a senile sex criminal in President Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, a bloodthirsty fanatic who’s been slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza for several years now with relative impunity.
The pro-war lunatics accuse anyone who opposes their folly of being supporters of the enemy, be they Iranian clerics today or Saddam Hussein back 20+ years ago. Their stated rationale for bombing, be it regime change or destroying Iran’s nuclear program, are just as flimsy and ill-defined as the yammering about WMD back in the day. The propaganda gets recycled, just swap in a different boogeyman.
Our government has seemingly made the calculation to keep our heads down and go along, lest we be singled out for more tariffs or annexation threats. Our PM has voiced his support for the U.S. operation (with regret), before following up with tepid calls for all parties to abide by “international engagement rules”. That’ll do it.
On Monday Trump said that the war will be over “soon” and they were “very far ahead of schedule,” but don’t go getting your hopes up.
The writer Hunter S. Thompson, in a column for ESPN titled “When the war drums roll” wrote the following passage 25 years ago in the days following 9/11, and it sums things up much better than I ever could:
“Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history – which is no doubt true – but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a war-time economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed.
That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what’s coming now. The party’s over, folks.”
The U.S. and Israel are embarking on a reckless endeavour that will inflict many more horrors on the region, and, sooner or later, will ripple out to the rest of the world. A spike in the price of oil is just the beginning.
