The US has boasted about sinking an Iranian ship near Sri Lanka. Apparently dozens of sailors died. That ship can have posed no serious threat to US forces. It was not engaged in combat. In the very unlikely event that it had tried to reach Iran – or posed some kind of a threat to US forces in some other part of the world – it could have been sunk then. It seems this was simply a piece of demonstrative killing.
This war in general seems to be, from the US side, largely about killing. The language of Hesketh and Trump is really quite disturbing. Hesketh boasting about a ‘quiet death’ for the dozens of sailors killed when they sunk this ship near Sri Lanka. So far, on the school strike [1] nothing other than the usual “we don’t target civilians” and “we are looking into it’ – hoping it will go off the media radar by the time the “investigation” decides to “find” anything. (of course; they already know exactly what happened). Trump – trying to pretend that the Iranians were negotiating in bad faith – called them ‘loonies’. By doing this he only shows an immense crudity. He doesn’t understand Iranians – too cultured and intelligent for him. So, for him, they are ‘loonies’.
There were no negotiations. That was a cynical cover. The US and Israel had planned this for months.
It looks like Israel sold the Trump administration a story about the Iranian threat, (for example this story about how they were building up a large ballistic missile shield behind which they could develop a nuclear bomb), and the Trump adminstration, being incapable of diplomacy, bought it. Now we are being fed familar sounding lies about “one month away from a nuclear bomb”. And, perhaps Trump and the unstatesman like crew around him, just couldn’t resist having a really big war.
Just like Iraq and Libya, there is no credible plan for the “day after”. Israel’s plan is, of course, to bomb Iran out of the world – and just have millions of them living in tents or destroying each other in a civil war. So long as there are no missiles and zero nuclear materials there Israel could not care less what happens. They may even prefer the site of pitiful refugees – something they seem to thrive on.
Final point; if the new criteria for war is preemptive strikes based on hypothetical worst case scenarios that means the only people who are safe are those with nuclear weapons.
Notes