I caught an Uber the other week and in conversation the driver asked me “so what do you think of the war?”.
I did ask him which “war” he meant, but then it became clear he was wanting to talk about the three week old bombing campaign happening in the Middle East against Iran.
It got me thinking about why that is going on and the point of it all.
Apart from the fact that innocent people are dying, for which there is no justification, is it a reasonable thing to bomb the bejeepers out of country in an effort to kill it’s top brass and force some sort of political change there?
I have never been to Iran myself, but did know an Iranian a few years ago who moved here after fighting in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. He described it as “hell on earth” and watched as wave after wave of young conscripts were forced to run in a suicidal wave towards machine guns.
I can’t find any description in books, magazines or movies that describes war as anything other than hell. Anyone who thinks otherwise obviously hasn’t been in one.
So here we are again, living in a world with multiple “wars” happening and we now have fancy ways of watching as “drone” cameras take us to the points of impact and numerous videos show us impacts, destruction and death.
I think as I get older I begin to realise that the human race hasn’t really advanced as much as it thinks it has. All that has changed is the efficiency by which we continue to kill each other and destroy the planet in the process.
Now I certainly am not thinking the Iranian bosses and their buddies are a particularly nice bunch of people. They decided that they would exterminate a couple of thousand people protesting against them a month or so ago, so I wouldn’t describe them as super tolerant of criticism, but there are lots of countries in the world which really do need a bit of a clean out at the top if you get my meaning.
The problem is though that the Americans have a history of running Governments (or tinpot dictators) out of town, but it leaves a wonderful power vacumn that so often gets filled up with more ruthless nutters. A good example of that was the hole left when Saddam Hussein got the heave ho and was replaced by….. a crowd called ISIS. Now they were not exactly a lovely bunch of people either.
Simply put, if you destabilise a place, it can be an open invitation for crackpots to take over.
However I started thinking a bit about the recent moves to oust Governments and leaders, particularly Venezuala and now Iran. Is it any surprise to anyone that these countries are ranked 20th and 7th respectively in the 2025 OPEC Oil Extraction list? There are 105 countries on there so they are pretty top contenders.
Now the US does run on oil and especially cars and heavy industry that all consume more oil than they drink Coca Cola, and the US is the top oil extraction country, but maybe, just maybe, they want to get their mitts on a bit more…
By the time I got to that part of the conversation my Uber guy had got me to my destination. Good place to finish I reckoned and he was driving a hybrid so that kind of matched the conversation.
There are no winners in wars, and even in our little corner of the world, we are losing too. Check out the petrol prices now if you don’t believe me. Cripes I remember carless days…. they might come back eh ?
