Hunker down. This is going to be a long and ugly war. It will descend from the skies where it is being fought now and will end up on the streets, with car bombs and terror attacks and underhand methods. It will sap all adversaries and their allies. No-one will be spared: it will have an impact on all of us, from Africa to the smallest patch of the world.
Even if the missiles that are zinging across the skies of the Middle East today are silenced, the wounds will fester. The grievances will be fanned and carried in the hearts of people walking the streets of the world’s capitals, on boats and other transport ferrying refugees across seas and borders, in the minds of children who will be taught hatred from the images of relentless bombings and the killings of innocent schoolgirls.
This war will be long for these many reasons but primarily and particularly for this one: there is no plan, no strategy, for how this ends and what comes after it. Donald Trump does not know what his objectives for the latest war on Iran are (or, if one is being charitable, cannot articulate them) and, as of Sunday evening when he gave a short interview to The New York Times, had no clue about what happens in Iran or the region when the bombardment stops.
How long will this continue? Trump said the barrage of missiles would last for “four to five weeks”.
We’ve all heard that one before.
In 2022 Vladimir Putin claimed that his foolhardy, cruel, inexplicable, egotistic attempt to colonise Ukraine — in what he named a “special military operation” — would be done and dusted within days. Now, four years later, he has run out of Russian boys to send to the front line. He is now deceiving African boys from KwaZulu-Natal and the slums of Nairobi to fight in his dirty war.
If Putin’s 2022 timeline is a measure, he has lost the war. He is now mired in the biggest land conflict in Europe since World War 2, as National Public Radio has pointed out. His caper has lasted longer than the Soviet army’s fight against Nazi Germany. No amount of propaganda can mask the fact that the once mighty Russian armed forces are being held by a tiny Ukrainian army.
Now Trump tells us it will take weeks for him to bomb Iran “until all of our objectives are achieved”. Let’s put time aside and ask: what objectives are those? Trump has shown that he does not know why he is bombarding Iran.
Iranian democrats saw him as an ally when he encouraged them to rise up against their oppressors. Now, very swiftly, he is not even on the side of democracy activists.
In his interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Trump suggested a potential outcome for this war that is similar to what he engineered in Venezuela, where he removed President Nicolás Maduro but kept the man’s entire team in place to work with him. Trump then went on to humiliate the main Venezuelan opposition leader and democrat, Maria Corina Machado, as being weak.
You have to see the Trump administration for what it is: a series of Tourette’s Syndrome-like actions and outbursts devoid of strategy. He does not know, beyond the initial bombings, what he wants with Iran. As for those desperate young people who massed in the streets fighting for democracy, he was happy to leave them in the lurch when it suited him.
His idea that a Venezuela-type solution for Iran might be in the offing reveals that he does not care about bringing democracy to Iran. As happened in Venezuela, he wants Iran’s vast oil resources and will work with pliant but anti-democratic Iranian leadership (the same “evil” Ayatollah Khamenei’s underlings) so long as he gets a financial reward for it.
For a decade, Trump claimed he would use his so-called negotiating prowess gained in business to end what he called “the forever wars”. Now, as Axios reports, he has attacked seven nations, three of which — Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela — had never been targeted by US military strikes before. The publication said he authorised more individual air strikes in 2025 than his derided predecessor, Joe Biden, did in four years.
All this means that this does not end now. Hunker down.
