World on fire

Through me you enter into the city of woe.

I don’t know where to start on all this. As a small child I remember asking my parents why there were such long queues at the petrol station, to be told it was because of the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East that was affecting fuel supply lines.

I was always a curious, news-aware child. As a pre-teen I recall when Anwar al-Sadat, the then president of Egypt and Menachem Begin shared the Nobel Peace prize, having signed the Camp David Accords, bringing about an end to hostilities between Egypt and Israel in 1978. Teenage-me watched the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah, and the subsequent Iran/Iraq war play out. Then, later, the Gulf War following the invasion of Kuwait, the WarOnTerror, in the wake of the 9/11 bombings, and, of course, the slaughter and devastation in Gaza after the October 11th massacres.

Each time one of these conflicts ends, there is the hope that it will be the last one. But it won’t. Human nature being what it is, there is no chance of that happening. And now the Middle East is on fire again, but this time the West is playing a bigger role. And by West, I mean the USA. It’s all just too much.

Sometimes, though, the only thing that will beat a bully is a bigger bully. So maybe that’s what it will take. It seems to be what President Trump thinks anyway. He’s not exactly one to follow Churchill’s feeling about less war-war and more jaw-jaw. And he may well think that Sir Kier Starmer is ‘no Winston Churchill’, but that’s kind of the point about Churchill, the man voted ‘Greatest Ever Briton’.

Iran is a boiling pot that has been bubbling away for years, way before Iran and Israel launched their attacks, and before the death of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei . Thousands of anti-regime protestors were killed in January alone. There are a number of possible ways this could end, which much of the mainstream media has been discussing: regime survival, regime change, regime alteration, or a descent into utter chaos. Which has happened before. Experience in Iraq and Afghanistan tells us that regime change by an outsider nation is not that easy.

Politics geek I may be, but I don’t know enough about Middle Eastern politics to really talk any sense. A far better option is to listen to Rory Stewart, who is far more knowledgeable, and Alastair Campbell, who just sounds as though he is, on their rather marvelous podcast The Rest Is Politics.

All I really can be sure of, is that however it ends, there will be serious implications for the rest of the world, whether the regime survives, is altered or changes completely. The conflict is already being felt across the region, in Cyprus, in Dubai, in Saudi Arabia.

The immediate consequence of course is that energy prices will spike, just as they did when Putin waltzed into Ukraine, and that ripples across every other cost of living. It means that the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Spring Statement, announced yesterday, but written a week ago, is probably already out-of-date.

This conflict could last weeks or it could last months, and the uncertainty will be hard to deal with. I have friends who are supposed to be moving to Saudi Arabia at the end of the month for two years, they should be there now, finalising things with their new house, but they’re still here.

At the very least, the chatterers about ‘Britain’s had it, I’m off to Dubai, it’s the place to be’ will go quiet for a while, and we might see a few changing their minds or coming home if they can. Not Richard Tice though. He can stay there.