The energy crisis engulfing the whole world is deepening with no sign of the war between Israel-USA and Iran ending immediately. The common man in India has already started to pay through his nose with the rise in gas prices and the cascading effects on items of daily consumption. Fuel prices are bound to follow soon. At this stage US President Donald Trump delivered on 9 March a vague and contradictory forecast for how long the US will continue to fight in Iran and what the ultimate goal of the US military campaign there will be.
Oil is hovering around $100 a barrel while Middle Eastern allies of the US are scared they are being sucked into the conflict directly, even though they are not on a warpath with Iran from the beginning. Trump appeared in Doral, Florida, to assuage the fear, calm global markets and reassure his allies that he has a clear vision for how to end the largest US intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war. But he refrained from even giving a broad hint about his plan. In a 35-minute appearance, the US President fought shy of going into the specifics and merely boasted, seemingly as part of usual war propaganda, of how thoroughly the US has destroyed Iran’s military. But his claims are suspect in the absence of any planning for what comes next. He only made the vague remark that the war was “very complete, pretty much” to a CBS News reporter in a phone call. He then parried a reporter’s question about whether that meant the war could wrap up this week. “No, but soon. I think very soon.” Reporters were relentless in their barrage of questions and told him, contrary to his claim that the war is “very complete,” his defence secretary says, “this is just the beginning.” When asked which of the two claims was correct, Trump said nonchalantly, “I think you could say both. It’s the beginning of building a new country.” But that has never been the stated objective of the war.
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On the contrary, Trump exhorted pro-democracy Iranians to do their bit for regime change after he had got Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the top leadership eliminated in missile attacks. Certainly, this is not the way a confident war strategist and commander-in-chief talks about the war he is supposedly winning. Trump continues to equivocate on the progress of the war, claiming one moment it is “a tremendous success right now” and the next moment contradicting himself stating they have “not won enough.” Such lack of confidence has led to the Democrats to say that Trump’s goals for the Iran conflict were incoherent or simply absent. It seems the way Iran has fought back, Trump has been surprised and left clueless. He appears not to have a plan and vision, while he is risking the world economy and the lives of millions. The traditional thought that taking out the leadership will make the system collapse into itself has been proven wrong in Iran.
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Seems that country does not have a top-to-bottom approach in military and governmental decision-making, unlike traditional feudal societies. Only a couple of weeks back, Trump was issuing diktats to other countries not to buy oil from Russia. Now he has allowed India to do so and announced on 9 March he would relax sanctions on certain countries’ sales of oil to help calm markets, reversing his own policy of increasing economic pressure on Russian oil sales to help end the conflict in Ukraine. He then added that the US may not ultimately return those sanctions once global markets return to normal. The market now decides who will live and who shall die. Iran, on the other hand, seems to have had its plan ready long back. It had decided that should it be forced to wage war with the USA, it will persist on its own conditions. Knowing well it can never match the US’ prowess, it has adopted the age-old policy of hurting the allies of a big power. With that end in view it has apparently piled up a never-ending stock of missiles and drones with which it is now wreaking havoc on all selected targets of Middle East allies of the US with the intent to indirectly harm the US where it hurts most. That strategy is at the moment proving effective as is evident from the confusion and contradictory claims of the US President. The rest of the world is unfortunately being made to suffer for Trump’s misadventure and a needless war.
