Fools & Knaves

Ben Wildsmith

When America is illegally attacking another country, it traditionally fabricates a pretext and sticks to it.

We are, officially, still expected to believe that credible intelligence existed that Iraq had stockpiled WMDs in 2003, for instance.

Only when a conflict is consigned to history can the good guys of geopolitics admit to the odd white lie in its dealings with whichever axis of evil urgently required more freedom and less oil.

Non-incidents like the Gulf of Tonkin attack, however, sit as precedents in recent US history and demand scepticism of us all when the war machine grinds into action once again.

This time, it seems, no coherent casus belli seems to have been agreed by the Trump administration. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is Trump’s only link to the Republican politics that existed before the party allowed the MAGA movement to tear its prom dress.

Cognisant that the attack on Iran required a defensive reasoning to be judged legal, he constructed a scenario whereby Israel could not be dissuaded from attacking Iran which would inevitably lead to Iranian retaliation against US targets in the region. This, he claimed, justified America getting its retaliation in first. Were you to show this to a visitor from another planet, or perhaps decade, he or she might conclude that it more readily makes the case for America attacking Israel than Iran.

Rubio’s case was on the board so briefly, however, that it never faced scrutiny on its own merits. Within a couple of hours, Trump had denied the Secretary’s reasoning, insisting that America had acted proactively rather than to mitigate to Israel’s plans.

If you don’t like that reason, though, they have others. It might because the mad mullahs need removing on behalf of the brave Iranian people. Then again, Trump also claims to have favoured figures within the regime who could take over, Venezuela-style. The Iranian people have been encouraged to rise up and sort this out for themselves. They have been promised ‘support’ from Trump if they do.

Then again, the administration has also let it be known that it is arming Kurdish militias who might fill the ‘boots on the ground’ that American certainly don’t want to see on the feet of their own sons and daughters.

How invading Kurdish forces will be met by the Iranian population is far from clear and, if Trump has made promises of a homeland, you will be hearing from Turkey’s armed forces in short order.

Nuclear threat

With echoes of Iraq, Trump firstly claimed the attacks were in response to an immediate nuclear threat from Iran. It began whilst Iranian negotiators were still engaged over their country’s nuclear programme, rendering ludicrous Keir Starmer’s claim that Iran could end the attacks by returning to a negotiating table at which they were already sat alone.

The week before the war started, the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told Tucker Carlson on camera that Israel would be morally justified in expanding to occupy all the land between the Euphrates and the Nile.

Anybody betting against that being an objective of the Netanyahu government is braver than I.

Let’s not allow the Islamic Republic and Israel to monopolise the theological reasoning for war. Multiple complaints from American troops claim that a commanding officer told them that Trump had been anointed by God to bring about Armageddon in the Middle East as prophesised in the Book of Revelation. I don’t know about you, but I certainly moved in a mysterious way when I read that.

Finally, though, it’s worth remembering that the US has surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of oil. The worse the conflict becomes, and the more chaos that ensues, the higher the price of oil will go and the wealthier American oil interests will become.

Canadian PM Mark Carney has walked back his initial support for this war, seemingly perplexed by the lack of compelling justification that he had assumed would be forthcoming from America.

'Defensive'

Keir Starmer has, characteristically, wandered into the worst of all possible worlds. Having enraged Trump by refusing UK assistance, he relented as long as he could label British involvement as ‘defensive’.

How that tallies with the use of British facilities to sink an Iranian troop ship in international waters is far from clear and the UK could yet face legal trouble over its involvement.

Anybody claiming moral superiority for a course of action in this mess isn’t paying attention properly. Israel is, at least, there to face the consequences of what it is doing.

The American public are, once again, so far away physically and culturally from what is happening as to be at the mercy of their leaders’ explanations. They will be the last to feel the potential effects of this conflict.

Amongst the first will be the energy consumers of Europe, where the price of gas has doubled and a smirking Vladimir Putin is threatening to call everyone’s bluff by cutting off supplies from Russia immediately.

The grand assumption of post-war statecraft has been that the UK and Europe share civilisational traits with America that entwine our interests.

American values

We need to face the possibility that American values have shifted so dramatically that this natural alliance no longer exists. There seems to be no nostalgic pull on Trump’s regime.

The idea of Europe as a restraining force is obsolete in the face of gangsterism that is happy to co-opt fundamentalist religion as ideological muscle.

If America, and Trump personally, are to profit from chaos then picking and choosing which elements of it we should support is as idiotic as it is immoral.

The only rational position for Starmer and European leaders is to insist on de-escalation. Picking sides in a confected war is for fools and knaves.