In the first weeks of the US-led war against Iraq in 1991, my friend Christopher Hitchens, who opposed the war, had a classic clash on US television with the actor Charlton Heston, who supported it.

“Two years from now, Iraq would have attacked Israel with nuclear weapons,” claimed Heston in justification for US military action, which Hitchens described as an act of “instantaneous barbarism”.

“Can he [Heston] tell me clockwise what countries have borders with Iraq?” asked Hitchens, to which Heston confidently replied: “Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia, Iran.” Since Bahrain is an island far from Iraq and Russia is 1,200 miles away, Hitchens retorted: “You have no idea where the country is on the map, but you are prepared to bomb it.”

At this point the CNN interviewer, who appeared in awe of Heston, made a mild intervention on his behalf, saying that “an instantaneous command of the geography of the region” was unnecessary in a discussion of the war.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hitchens in a devastating riposte. “If you are going to bomb a country you might pay it the compliment of knowing where it is.” A clearly nettled Heston angrily accused Hitchens of insulting him by delivering “a high school geography lesson”, inviting a derisive response from Hitchens who told the famous actor “to keep his hairpiece on”.

The exchange is relevant today because Donald Trump and his advisers evidently shared Heston’s ignorance of the geography of the Gulf region when they started, together with Israel, to bomb Iran on 28 February. Had they looked at the map more carefully, they might have noticed that the entire 615-mile-long northern side of the Gulf is Iranian territory.

At the eastern exit from the Gulf is the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide shipping channel through which in normal times pass tankers carrying a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Opposite Iran on the south side of the Gulf, within easy range of Iranian missiles and drones, are located some of the wealthiest, most fragile and most vulnerable states in the world: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Iraq to the north and Oman to the south are also in the firing line.

The vulnerability of the Gulf states stems from their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz. But they are also home to a huge, vastly expensive and largely indefensible concentration of oil and gas facilities. A single cheap Iranian drone poses sufficient threat to close them down. When a drone or missile does get through without being hit by an interceptor missile, the world witnesses – despite vain efforts by local authorities to suppress information about the level of destruction – spectacular fires erupt and columns of oily black smoke rise into the sky.

The reputation of the Gulf states as safe havens was always overblown and is now in ruins. These countries owed everything to their giant oil and gas reserves. In a sense, they have always lived on borrowed time in the most unstable and dangerous region in the world. Yet, until a couple of weeks ago, nobody appeared to find it surprising that giant oil and gas facilities, airports, desalination plants, business headquarters, tourist hotels and a migrant workforce were perched on the periphery of a war zone, which has now expanded to include them.

Trump and his grotesque coterie believed that they were starting a war with Iran, but in practice they are fighting a third Gulf War, similar in some respects to the first in 1990-91, when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait and sought control of the Gulf. The second Gulf war was all about the fate of Iraq, which with 46 million people is the most populous of the Arab Gulf states.

Why did Trump abandon his past electorally-popular commitment to avoid military entanglements in the Middle East? Hubris amounting to megalomania after his success in kidnapping president Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela on 3 January was clearly a factor. Unrelenting pressure by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and pro-Netanyahu donors in the US was another. Neoconservative policymakers in Washington have long yearned to eliminate Iran and have stressed how easy this would be. Anti-government protests in Iran in January encouraged Trump to believe that the Iranian regime might collapse, if given a hard enough jolt. He sounds increasingly infuriated that there is no sign of this happening.

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” Trump wrote on Thursday in a social media post. “Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth.”

Trump is unlikely to know the old military dictum warning those who go to war to “remember that the enemy also has a plan”. In the case of the present war, the Iranian plan is clearly to close down the Gulf and keep it closed, while spreading the war and inflicting as much mayhem as possible in the region to maximise economic pain on the world.

Why did not the Iranians do this before? Ironically, it was apparently the assassinated Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had in the past urged caution in responding to US and Israeli decapitation attacks on Iranian military, political and scientific leaders. Counter-strikes were largely symbolic, telegraphed well ahead in order not to kill American soldiers. But it became increasingly obvious that this restraint was being interpreted in Israel and the US as an indication of weakness.

This encouraged a misperception in Washington about the strength and direction of Iranian retaliation when the war began. US Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, had downplayed the idea of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz because it had not happened before.

“If you look back at the 12-day war last year, that’s a pretty serious conflict with a major oil producer,” he told Bloomberg dismissively in mid-February. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down.”

Yet since the war began the price of oil has risen from about $71 to $100 a barrel, peaking at $118 a barrel this Monday. His lack of grip on the situation was underlined this week when he first posted that a US navy vessel had escorted a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz and then deleted the claim 10 minutes later.

It is still premature to add the name of Trump to the long list of British and American leaders whose political careers were capsized by Middle East crises. Over the last century, these include three British prime ministers – David Lloyd George, Anthony Eden and Tony Blair. Winston Churchill’s career was long hobbled by his disastrous failure at Gallipoli. Two American presidents, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, were both badly hit by military failure. Ronald Reagan’s reputation never bounced back from the Iran-Contra scandal.

Common to these British and American leaders was the disastrous belief that they could win cheap military or political victories in the Middle East. Trump could be the latest victim of this delusion.

A sign of how the violent zeitgeist of the Trump-Netanyahu era, with its contempt for legality, has debased international relations more generally is the uncritical acceptance by European leaders of the assassination of Khamenei.

Some justify the killing by saying that he was a bad man, as if this was sufficient justification for a foreign government killing the leader of a sovereign state of whom they disapproved. Do they plan to bomb the Kremlin in order to dispose of President Vladimir Putin on the same basis? Most dislike Donald Trump, but presumably none are plotting to kill him.

It is noticeable that the Western media seldom mention that Khamenei was killed along with his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren, the youngest of whom was 14 months old. Many press reports about Mojtaba, the surviving son now chosen as the new supreme leader, refer to him as a “hardliner”, as if this can be attributed solely to ideological fanaticism, and has nothing to do with the massacre of his entire family.

The assassination of Khamenei fits very well into the Shia tradition of martyrdom, the refusal to bow to evil oppressors just as Imam Hussein was killed with his family at the battle of Karbala in 680AD. This drama of sacrifice is at the heart of Shiaism, much as the crucifixion of Jesus is central to Christianity. Iranians have become more secular over the years, but for the religious, the killing of Khamenei reinforces solidarity in resisting the US-Israeli attack.

Western pundits debate the positive and negative consequences of a “decapitation” policy, as if this was an acceptable tactic in relations between states. In the event, it is as likely to strengthen as weaken the resistance of the Iranian regime, since the generals and security chiefs killed at the same time as Khamenei were reportedly more moderate than those who took their place.

On occasion, assassinations have a crippling effect when one pre-eminent leader – Abraham Lincoln in the US in 1865 or prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1995 – is killed. More often, assassinations have only a limited and temporary effect, and may even be beneficial to an organisation because they promote a sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest.

The US army in Iraq once had an assassination campaign to eliminate the leaders of local cells planting lethal roadside bombs (IEDs) which killed so many American troops. But an army study of this later revealed that the campaign was dismayingly counter-effective and American military losses climbed after a local bomb-planting cell leader was killed or detained. The reason for this was that the new cell leader was probably a relative of the dead man and was eager for revenge. He might also be trying to prove he was up for the job by blowing up more Americans than before.

An old cliché holds that “truth is the first casualty of war”, though it might be argued that poor old truth does not necessarily do too well in peace time. Nevertheless, it is always true in time of war that combatants are duty bound to lie in the interests of their own side and to damage the enemy. Given that Trump has been known to tell lies, war does not necessarily produce a surge in his level of mendacity.

Shooting wars are always accompanied by information wars. Nothing much can be done about this by the news consumer, except to be eternally sceptical and build up a list of those news outlets that carry eyewitness reports. I look more at the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera and CNN because they have correspondents in Tehran, while the BBC does not.

Propaganda or deliberate fake news is a problem since it is designed to be attractive to news editors. But there are other problems: wars are complex and all the arrows seldom point in the same direction. In order to reach the largest possible number of consumers, some news outlets oversimplify and dilute the new to make it more digestible for their audiences. Because wars are such big news, there is an automatic de-skilling as inexperienced staff are thrown willy-nilly into the fray.

Here is a good account by the civilian harm watchdog Airwars of why it is difficult to know how many civilians have been killed in air attacks and prove it in the face of official air force denials.

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