The naked war

I’m old enough to remember when we had reasons for wars. No, really, it used to be a thing: having reasons for wars. There was even a legal term for it — casus belli — which shows just how much of a real thing it was.

Now they’ve given up having reasons. It’s just ‘wham-bam, thank you ma’am’ for serving up your kids as cannon fodder.

Back in the day, there were always two reasons for having a war: the public one, which was always a big, obvious lie, and the real reason, which was base and depraved, serving only corporations, strategic interests, or the control of resources. Governments knew that ordinary people wouldn’t risk their lives solely for the further enrichment of the rich, so they provided us with a public reason.

In the case of the Iraq War, for example, the US government claimed that Iraq was a threat to the rest of the world, even though this couldn’t possibly be true. They even invented new terminology to scare us into caring. ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ was the main one. They assigned this scary terminology curt initials to make it sound more important, technical, and real: WMD.

What they really wanted was control of Iraq’s resources and the privatisation of its huge nationalised industries, so that Western companies could own them and extract profit from the Iraqi people and their land. The Iraqi economy was potentially massive, and the big corporations simply wanted it online rather than sidelined.

Wham-kaboom-bam; thank you once again, ma’am.

The existence of a public rationale was a useful fiction; it provided a veneer of legitimacy. It allowed the masses to rally behind a bold banner, the étendard de guerre, while the agnostics — those unprepared to risk the social cost of dissent — could quietly hide behind that same flag. For those of us who knew the rationale was bollocks, we were forced to engage with the lie rather than the real reasons, which power itself declined to state.

The current war has no rationale. It has no public, made-up excuse; it doesn’t even have a real, unstated purpose. It just is. In this way, it is a naked war. It has no étendard in which to drape itself, to hide its embarrassment. It is perfectly appropriate for an emperor who has no clothes.

‘The war is about regime change. No, it isn’t; it’s about the nuclear weapons — oh, no, it isn’t, because we destroyed the nuclear programme last year, so it can’t be that. It’s because Bibi forced our hand — oh, no, it isn’t, because no one, not even Bibi, forces the hand of the US. So, it’s about regime change again — oh, no, we already said it was and wasn’t that! It’s about End Times, the cosmic battle between good and evil! Yes, we like the sound of that: it’s a cosmic battle.’

Where reason is shut out, superstition rushes in to fill the vacuum. Commanders in the field have presented the mission to the troops in Biblical End Times terms, framing the strikes as the inevitable arrival of Gog and Magog. And so we see Trump in the Oval Office, bowed under the laying on of hands by a communion of evangelicals.

Yes, we have people — including the Secretary of War — who believe in the literal truth of Armageddon whispering in Trump’s ear. Trump loves to be the centre of attention and longs for an indelible legacy; what a temptation it must be to be remembered by history as the person who ended it.

Is this refusal to name, or even think about, what you are doing ‘refreshing candour’, or is it another illustration of the contempt in which the administration holds ordinary people? They don’t need to know; they just need to follow. The righteousness of our war is self-evident.

Whatever it is, it isn’t a ‘woke’ war, gloats Hegseth: there will be no namby-pamby nation-building, no pussy mercy — especially not for those school kids in Minab or the crew of the frigate IRIS Dena.

Clearly ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the reality of war, Hegseth and Trump are revelling in the death and destruction.

‘Death and destruction from the sky all day long,’ according to Hegseth, barely able to keep his hands off himself. ‘This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.’ This, we must remind ourselves, is the second-in-command of the largest, most powerful military in the world, and not a hyperventilating nine-year-old playing Call of Duty.

Trump, who wore a branded USA baseball cap to the event bringing home the remains of the six US service personnel killed in the war so far, said of their deaths: ‘We expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.’ I’m sure the dead personnel and their families will be comforted to know their lives had such high transactional value.

And let’s be clear: the Pentagon itself — Trump’s own war machine — informed the White House on 27 February, two days before the first missiles were launched, that contrary to the claims of the administration, Iran was not only unready to attack anyone, it was in no position to do so. In addition, the IAEA pointed out that Iran was nowhere near making nuclear weapons. Trump’s case for war was empty; his casus belli was casus bollocks.

What makes the war even more appalling and terrifying is this sudden, irrational explosion of mindless violence. There is no reasoning with the irrational. It is the energy of the sociopathic thug unleashed on the world; the pub psycho smashing his glass into a bystander’s face on a global scale.

An Iranian naval ship — reportedly unarmed — making its way home is torpedoed, leaving 87 confirmed dead, approximately 60 missing, and only 32 survivors. Those kids in that school in Minab were having a normal school day when, without reason, a hammer blow from the sky destroyed the building: nearly 200 dead.

Reports suggest the school was listed as a target by an AI; thus, not only are human emotions absent from the aggression, but human thought is absent too. And so we circle back to the prayers in the Oval Office, because the humans at the top of the kill chain have nothing better to do than perform righteousness while robots, not angels, guide the swords of the righteous killers.

War is always mad; war is, by definition, irrational. But this war — stripped of reason, rhyme, purpose, or objective — is truly naked aggression.