Iran

American alliances and security commitments tend to live on long after the world has changed. Many of our far flung military bases are legacies of a Cold War that ended decades ago. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Nato alliance became all but obsolete, so it eagerly embraced conflicts in the Balkans, Libya, Syria and other locations far from the Central European theater it was originally designed to protect. However, none of these holdover security commitments seem as absurd as US military operations in the Persian Gulf during a COVID-19 oil market.As recently as last month, the United States was keeping two aircraft carrier battle groups deployed near the Persian Gulf.

In a roundabout way, coronavirus may have been responsible for the deaths of two American service personnel and a British soldier in a rocket attack in Iraq on Wednesday. This triggered a prompt US military retaliation — American forces launched strikes at five sites in the early hours of this morning — and the prospect now is of an escalation while the rest of the world is consumed with a global health crisis. What's going on? It was Gen. Qasem Soleimani’s birthday on Wednesday and a Shiite militia — probably Kataib Hezbollah — chose to mark the occasion by firing Katusha rockets at Camp Taji, the US base just north of Baghdad.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Get lost ayatollahs!’ ‘Death to Khamenei!’ The bravery of the anti-government demonstrators in Tehran is incredible, each one knowing that their actions could end with a bullet or a noose. I reached one through their favored encrypted app, Telegram, the interview arranged by a leading Iranian opposition group outside the country. ‘Elias’ — not his real name of course — is 25 and a postgraduate politics student in Tehran. The security forces were everywhere, he told me; everyone was very afraid. Still, he went on, ‘There is only one way this ends: toppling the regime.

What a difference a week makes when it comes to the western media narrative on the Middle East. When countless millions were mourning Gen. Qasem Soleimani in what was possibly the biggest funeral in history, we were told that Iran and its leadership had never been more united. Now, amid smaller protests inside the country against the mistaken downing of a Ukrainian airliner with mostly Iranian students on board, we are told that the Iranian people are rising up en masse to overthrow their hated leaders. Have the famously sophisticated Iranian people really become so absurdly fickle overnight? There is another explanation for the self-contradictory nonsense we are being told. Whatever happens in the Middle East, there is only one constant.

Last week, like millions of others across the globe, I emerged blinking and stumbling from my fallout bunker to assess the destruction wrought by World War Three. There were a few surprises in store. Nukes had failed to rain from the sky. Critical infrastructure remained intact. Rationing was not yet in force. People still weren’t going to see Cats. World War Three, historians will note, consisted of: an assassination, a poorly organized funeral, the histrionic launching of a few sketchy rockets, an Everest of bad tweets and the downing of a passenger plane. But one thing remained as permanent as the second law of thermodynamics: all of this was Donald Trump’s fault.