When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him.

The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief.

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At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he launched a devastating series of pre-emptive strikes against any media narrative that threatened to make sense.

After the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, intelligence sources intimated that the US had been cultivating a senior insider to take over the dictatorship, à la Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. But Comical Donnie promptly informed ABC that the attack on Tehran’s leadership compound had been ‘so successful it knocked out most of candidates… It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’

Operation Epic Fury could go on for four to five weeks, he said. The mission was ‘ahead of schedule’, yet might go on ‘far longer’. Timelines are for losers. ‘Wars can be fought “forever”,’ Trump promised on social media in the early........

© The Spectator