Two Months of Senseless, Unnecessary War

45 million people will be at risk of acute hunger if this keeps going into June.

The U.S. and Israel started a senseless, criminal war of aggression against Iran two months ago, and that war set much of the rest of the region on fire. The aggressors failed to achieve anything beyond inflicting death and destruction while causing massive damage to the region and the global economy. The smart thing to do now would be for the U.S. and Israel to cut their losses and accept Iran’s latest proposal, but that seems unlikely to happen.

Thousands of people have been killed by U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles in Iran and Lebanon, and millions have been displaced from their homes. Only one-third of the targets that the U.S. and Israel have struck have been military sites. The rest have been civilian, commercial, and government buildings with the first two accounting for 40% of all targets. This is a war on Iran and the Iranian people. The current U.S. blockade aimed at strangling Iran’s economy is more proof of that.

Thanks to this completely unnecessary war, the U.S. will be weaker, poorer, and more despised than it was. Relations with its European allies have been seriously damaged, and the administration seems determined to strain them further with threats of punishment. The U.S. has expended a large percentage of its stockpiles of interceptors and advanced munitions in a conflict it needn’t have fought and won’t win.

The economic shock from the war is already being felt around the world, and the shock is going to become much more severe over the next few months. The shortages caused by the halt in shipping traffic are huge and growing ever larger. Eventually the reality of this catastrophe is going to set in and it won’t be possible for the president to jawbone the markets into being irrationally optimistic.

The war is likely to leave all sides worse off than they were before. The longer that this disaster is allowed to drag on, the worse it will be for everyone. Fertilizer and fuel shortages are driving up costs for farmers, and that is creating a food crisis. The poorest countries in the world will be hardest hit, but every country is going to feel the effects.

Adam Hanieh concluded his recent essay in The Financial Times:

Famine and widening food insecurity are the foreseeable consequences of military aggression in the Gulf. That reality ought to weigh heavily on a world that has largely understood this war through the narrow lens of oil-price instability.

Thirty million people are being driven back into poverty because of the economic consequences of the war. Some 45 million people will be at risk of acute hunger if this keeps going into June. The entire world is being made to suffer because of the arrogance and stupidity of the U.S. and Israeli governments.

There is no time to waste on fruitless talks over the nuclear issue or other intractable disputes. The U.S. and Iran are unlikely to reach a compromise in the foreseeable future as long as Trump is in office. The U.S. should lift its blockade and negotiate an end to the war as quickly as possible.