‘Wars’ as grand distractions (1)
Last week, we were all confronted with the possibility of another world war that international bodies like the United Nations have tried to prevent, albeit rather weakly so far.
United States President Donald Trump, in his usual blustering style of articulating his wild thoughts, together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, decided to strike the Islamic Republic of Iran with bombs that immediately killed the latter’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some members of the ruling council. More tragically, it also cut short the lives of more than 160 schoolgirls in an elementary school there.
Trump and Netanyahu have together waged a “war” that was not technically a war. It was a plain crime of aggression against a sovereign nation by two of the world’s imperious bullies—Trump and Netanyahu.
Constitutions or the basic laws of sovereign countries usually provide that elected leaders of their sovereign states cannot unilaterally wage a war against another state or country without the approval of their respective national congresses. Several American lawmakers—from both Republican and Democratic parties—have expressed in no uncertain terms that this new conflagration that Trump has waged is “illegal,” and violates one of the key provisions of the American Constitution. Many legislators are former servicemen and servicewomen who have served combat duties in various “wars” that the US has waged, usually through its elected presidents. Such earlier “wars” suggested they were more aggressive American government actions to distract the attention of the American voting public.
In the aftermath of World War II, several international institutions and conventions were agreed upon by consensus among the world’s sovereign countries. Leaders have agreed that they do not want to see another global war that will decimate certain populations and cripple their respective economies. This is roughly the rationale behind the creation of the UN system, its Security Council, and all other institutional and organizational bodies that aim to make the world more peaceful and sustainable, following certain universal conventions and legal instruments.
However, the same international bodies that created institutions to make the world safe also found themselves agreeing to give rise to a state that soon played a central role in rearranging the world, figuratively speaking.
This is the state of Israel, created officially on May 14, 1948, as proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency. Then US President Harry S. Truman formally accepted the creation of a new “home” for the “displaced” Jewish people from various parts of the world in half the area of Palestine. The creation of this new state stems from a 67-word letter by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a known Zionist leader in Great Britain, expressing British government support for establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It was considered a controversial statement that significantly influenced Zionist efforts and led to future tensions, as it impinged on the rights of the indigenous non-Jewish communities, like the Palestinians in the area.
To this day, several political observers of the tensions in the so-called Middle East consider the “Balfour Declaration” as having engendered present irritants, especially with the hegemonic desire of the current Israeli government run by Netanyahu. Netanyahu wants to see a “greater Israel” to include many of the rich Gulf countries that are the primary sources of oil and fuel supplies to many parts of the world, including the Philippines.
In the latter part of 2025, Trump ordered American troops to swoop down on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, extracting, or actually “arresting” President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, for allegedly causing the deaths of “many, many Americans” (in Trump’s words) as the head of a huge drug ring that distributes illegal drugs in the US. That action was to cause a “regime change” in Venezuela, a sovereign state.
Perhaps Trump and his sycophants in the US Cabinet thought their “success” in Venezuela could work in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Against the advice of top US military advisers, Trump and Netanyahu prepared for an eventual strike on Iran just as negotiators from both Iran and the US were trying to conclude an agreement to go into a series of diplomatic initiatives rather than going to war.
They were wrong. Iran is not Venezuela; it is not a secular state like the latter. It is ruled by a council of religious leaders that exerts both religious and political authority in that republic. Like Venezuela, Iran boasts of various natural resources, foremost of which are their oil and uranium.
(More next week.)
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