As an approach to winning the Nobel Peace Prize,
starting an illegal war is certainly a novel one. Maybe Trump has abandoned all
hope of ever winning the prize, or maybe he thinks that by starting a war which
he can end at any time he chooses, he will shortly have another war to add to
the list of the ones he’s personally ended. He certainly talks and behaves as
though he assumes that no-one will remember what he did or said yesterday,
never mind last year, so by the time he ends it, no-one – in his mind – will ever
believe that he started it.
There is a huge difference between the world views of the late Ayatollah
and Trump. On the one hand, the Ayatollah believed that he was god’s servant,
doing god’s will by imposing his version of religion on the people of Iran and
the wider world whereas, on the other hand, Trump believes that he was sent by (the
same) god to impose divine will by the use of whatever force is necessary. The
main lesson from that is that people in a position of power who believe that
they have a unique ability to interpret god’s will, and a duty to impose that
will on others by whatever means necessary, are inherently dangerous to the
world. It’s not a particularly new lesson, sadly.
Trump’s actual motives are as clear as mud, and seem to
change every time he opens his mouth. Preventing Iran from developing a nuclear
weapon by destroying facilities which Trump told us had already been completely
obliterated last year; revenge for terrorist acts (allegedly) carried out by or
at the behest of the Iranian government; pre-empting an attack by Iran for which
there was no credible evidence; ‘justice’ for the thousands of protestors killed
on the streets of Iran and preventing the regime from carrying out further such
killings; revenge for Iran being named in some utterly incredible conspiracy
theory as being in cahoots with Venezuela to steal the 2020 election. Take your
pick – any, all, or none of the above. But, to consider just one of those: killing
hundreds of civilians to stop the Iranian authorities from killing civilians is
a strange proposition to many of us, although as Stalin may or may not have said, “a
single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. As Trump’s
rather offhand dismissal of the deaths of US service personnel to date demonstrated,
for someone so lacking in human empathy as him even a single death (as long as
it isn’t his own) is merely a statistic.
Underlying it all, though, there is a very serious point,
which an arbitrary attack on Iran does more to disguise than to reveal. There
are regimes in the world which are a danger to their own citizens and the
citizens of other (mostly neighbouring) countries, and it is a mark of failure
for the international order that humanity has no effective way of dealing with
them. Having international laws and rules is the easy part; enforcing them is
quite another matter. It’s easy enough to identify Iran, North Korea and Russia
as dangerous states, but dealing only with the one which does not currently possess
nuclear weapons is about the best incentive I can think of for further nuclear
proliferation. And then, there’s the even bigger question – who decides what is
or is not a rogue state where regime change is required for the good of
humanity? I named three above, because they’re reasonably uncontroversial. But
what about Israel, for instance, with its creeping annexation of the West Bank and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza? What, indeed, about the USA under its current
administration? Kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them, ‘repatriating’
them without due process to places they’ve never visited, interfering in the
affairs of other states both politically and militarily, blowing up boats in international waters, threatening to seize territory by force, kidnapping one
national leader and assassinating another? Which characteristic of a rogue
state has the US failed to meet?
There is no easy or simple solution to the problem;
humanity has some way to go before we recognise that we are one species sharing
one planet and need to co-operate, share, and live by a common basic set of
rules. It’s much easier to say what the solution isn’t than identify what it is
– but it definitely isn’t allowing the biggest and most powerful to take
whatever arbitrary decisions suit its own selfish interests, or those of its
rulers. Trump is taking the world backwards – and the UK’s Labour government now seems set on enabling and supporting him in that endeavour.
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