Regardless of how long US President Donald Trump’s ill-advised war and today’s stagflationary conditions last, the long-run consequences will be profound. Fancying himself an absolute monarch, Trump has broken something he cannot fix and unleashed forces he cannot control.

It is true, as Alexander Pope once said, that to err is human. But while everyone is fallible, some humans are more prone to error than others. That is a justification for democracy – for subjecting decisions that affect large numbers of people to deliberative processes, which  include checks and balances. The history of authoritarian and absolutist political rule is rife with figures whose mistakes proved calamitous not just for themselves but for the societies they ruled

No decision is more important than waging war against another country. Yet the United States has done exactly that without even a nod to its own system of checks and balances and reasoned deliberation. Like the kings of old, America’s mendacious, impulsive president, Donald Trump, remains unchecked by the legislature and surrounded by sycophants who will tell him only what he wants to hear. The disastrous result is now clear: America is once again embroiled in a Middle East war that has already cost thousands of lives – mostly civilians – and in which it has almost certainly committed multiple war crimes.

No one knows how long the war with Iran will last, how many more war crimes will be committed or how many more innocents will be........

© Pearls and Irritations