Tony Rakhal-Fras­er

Over the past year, I have oc­ca­sion­al­ly fo­cused on a world slid­ing in­to in­creas­ing con­flict with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it flar­ing in­to vi­o­lent, wide­spread en­gage­ment. Dri­ving the hot wars in the Mid­dle East (the Rus­sia-Ukraine con­flict hav­ing been pushed to the back burn­er for the present; but still very po­tent) are the egos and de­sires of US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”, which trans­lates in­to a hege­mon­ic con­trol over the world and the hy­dro­car­bon and oth­er nat­ur­al re­sources of sov­er­eign coun­tries such as Venezuela and Green­land, now Iran.

At the oth­er end of the con­flict, the ag­gres­sor is Is­rael’s Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Ne­tanyahu, who has tak­en a map to the UN Gen­er­al As­sem­bly with Pales­tine re­moved from the Mid­dle East. His cur­rent at­tack on Iran, based on his con­tention, one that he has been mak­ing for more than 20 years, is that Tehran is months away from de­vel­op­ing nu­clear weapons ca­pa­bil­i­ty.

On en­ter­ing his first pres­i­den­tial term, 2016, Pres­i­dent Trump im­me­di­ate­ly dis­missed a nu­clear peace agree­ment reached with Iran by his pre­de­ces­sor in of­fice, Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. The con­clu­sion by the US Pres­i­dent was based on re­ports from the In­ter­na­tion­al Atom­ic En­er­gy Agency, which on Jan­u­ary 16, 2016, “ver­i­fied that Iran met crit­i­cal nu­clear re­stric­tions, trig­ger­ing the lift­ing of in­ter­na­tion­al sanc­tions un­der the Joint Com­pre­hen­sive Plan of Ac­tion (JCPOA). The IAEA con­firmed Iran re­duced its en­riched ura­ni­um stock­pile by 98 per cent and re­moved thou­sands of cen­trifuges.”

“It’s the worst deal ever,” said Pres­i­dent Trump as he scut­tled the peace ac­cord.

Not too in­ci­den­tal­ly, two days be­fore Is­rael’s launch of its present at­tack on Iran, the ef­fort to ar­rive at a peace deal, dis­cus­sions on which were be­ing host­ed by Oman, was to the ef­fect that mean­ing­ful ad­vances were be­ing made.

The easy con­clu­sion to reach is the de­sire and in­tent of Is­rael and the US to dis­man­tle the Iran­ian Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic to make the re­gion safe for Is­rael, Pales­tini­ans hav­ing al­ready been re­moved from Gaza.

The two lead­ers of war­like ag­gres­sion have had le­gal mat­ters of a se­ri­ous na­ture brought against them in the courts of their coun­tries. In the in­stance of Pres­i­dent Trump, win­ning the elec­tion pre­vent­ed him from hav­ing to face those mat­ters. It is, there­fore, not far-fetched to think of politi­cians us­ing the proven tac­tic of cre­at­ing dis­trac­tions to move the fo­cus away from po­ten­tial­ly dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions fac­ing them.

Out­side of the courts, Pres­i­dent Trump is said to have been named in the Ep­stein re­port which al­leged­ly con­tains neg­a­tive in­for­ma­tion on him. A num­ber of De­mo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians in the Con­gress have claimed that the US Pres­i­dent is pro­filed in a neg­a­tive man­ner in the re­port. It is al­so im­por­tant to note that Pres­i­dent Trump’s po­lit­i­cal record is one of hav­ing been twice im­peached by the US Con­gress and con­vict­ed in the US court for a sex­u­al of­fence.

Re­gard­ing Trump’s as­so­ciate in the war, Ne­tanyahu, he has been in­dict­ed in Is­rael’s high court on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, those are charges which await him. Get­ting rid “once and for all time” of both the Pales­tin­ian claims to Is­rael, and elim­i­nat­ing a sup­posed nu­clear threat posed by Iran, the Is­raeli Prime Min­is­ter must have cal­cu­lat­ed that based on his per­for­mance as list­ed above, he is as­sured of win­ning the gen­er­al elec­tion sched­uled for lat­er this year, and so end­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing to face the courts.

The point be­ing made here is that the two lead­ers are not Sun­day School teach­ers and have had crim­i­nal mat­ters raised against them in the courts of their coun­tries.

Nei­ther have the lead­ers of the Iran­ian Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic been in­no­cent fel­lows. Over a long pe­ri­od of time since the es­tab­lish­ment of the Re­pub­lic in 1979, suc­ceed­ing Ay­a­tol­lahs have pur­sued quite a mea­sure of in­sti­tu­tion­al vi­o­lence against ob­jec­tors. At a re­cent protest demon­stra­tion, there was a re­port­ed killing of 3,500 pro­tes­tors by the Iran­ian se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices.

Not to be out­done, the killing of 153 chil­dren by the bomb­ing of their school has been blamed on the armies of both Is­rael and the US. Iran, for its part, has been bomb­ing neigh­bour­ing Arab-Is­lam­ic coun­tries such as Qatar, Sau­di Ara­bia, and oth­ers, the claim be­ing that the strikes have been against US bases in those coun­tries.

So there are no in­no­cents in this war.

In re­la­tion to the po­lit­i­cal econ­o­my of the world, it has been re­port­ed that Iran has closed the Strait of Hor­muz, which car­ries 20 per cent of the world’s en­er­gy sup­plies from pro­duc­tion coun­tries to in­dus­tri­al sites across the world. So too, a num­ber of en­er­gy-based coun­tries in the re­gion have shut down their pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties.

The re­sult has al­ready re­flect­ed it­self in short­ages, price in­creas­es and pos­si­ble medi­um to long term dam­age to fa­cil­i­ties and sup­ply trains tak­ing the vi­tal en­er­gy sup­plies to mar­kets across the world. If the con­flict ends quick­ly, read­just­ment will be quick and with­out too much dam­age. If, as Pres­i­dent Trump has said, US troops can be there for the next month that will be suf­fi­cient time for mean­ing­ful dam­age to the world econ­o­my.

Tony Rakhal-Fras­er—free­lance jour­nal­ist, for­mer re­porter/cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme host and News di­rec­tor at TTT, pro­gramme pro­duc­er/cur­rent af­fairs di­rec­tor at Ra­dio Trinidad, cor­re­spon­dent for the BBC Caribbean Ser­vice and the As­so­ci­at­ed Press, grad­u­ate of UWI, CARI­MAC, Mona and St Au­gus­tine—In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions.