US President George Bush handed Iraq to an Iran-backed Shia Muslim majority on a silver platter after nearly 400 years of Sunni minority rule. President Joe Biden pushed Russia into dependence on China for the first time in nearly 1,000 years. Now, President Donald Trump is pushing Iran into the stifling embrace of Russia and China, undermining its over 3,000-year-old Persian civilisation.
And India, the 7,000-year-old civilisation at the threshold of leading the entire Asian, Central Asian and South-east Asian region, stands frozen like a deer stunned by the headlights of a truck on a dark mountain road. Delhi seems unable to decide on what to do even as Trump threatens to destroy Iran to obtain its theocratic regime’s unconditional surrender.
This scene would be surreal were it not for the people dying every hour in Israel, Iran, Lebanon and the Gulf kingdoms under showers of the most devastatingly enormous bombs ever dropped on anyone. “When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers,” Mark Twain wrote in Pudd'nhead Wilson. A rain of ill luck is indeed drenching hapless children, women and men in those countries. Reportedly, an errant US-made Tomahawk missile has killed some 180 primary school girls in Iran already.
And ill luck continues to shower upon Israel’s Jews, still struggling to survive after 3,000 years of real suffering and discrimination, mostly in Europe. Mossad, Israel’s terrifying secret service that unrelentingly discovers its enemies’ deepest secrets, helped to kill Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the current war’s opening hours. And, what more does ill luck plan for the impoverished people of South Lebanon? They were ordered to exit lock, stock and barrel, over 750,000 of them, within a handful of hours to escape blanket bombing by Israel’s coldly efficient air force.
The rock upon which all that ill luck stands is Trump, chairman of the global Board of Peace, recommended by many governments for the Nobel prize for peace, and commander-in-chief of our planet’s most destructive ever military force. He commands almost limitless quantities of high-tech weapons and budgets that defy the imaginations of most science fiction writers. And here we are, the rest of us, wringing our hands as our hearts burst with tears at the live stream of horrifying real-time images from the Gulf’s multiple killing fields.
Meanwhile, the current rulers of India and China, who claim the mantles of this earth’s most ancient civilisations, shuffle in self-imposed silence at the epic pain being inflicted on their competitor cradles of humankind, the Persians and the Jews. “No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn,” wrote nature journalist Hal Borland. Let’s pray he was right, although prospects for the Gulf war ending before next winter seem remote.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully got a temporary break for Indian firms by persuading Trump to let them buy the sanctioned Russian oil. But many small business owners across India are already teetering on the edge of closure, following worsening scarcity of gas and fading prospects for an early return to better days.
Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who lost his mother, wife, sister, brother-in-law and niece in the joint Israel-US decapitation strikes that killed his father, declared in his first statement: “Iran will not refrain from avenging the blood of its martyrs.” Tehran will seek compensation from its adversaries, or destroy their assets accordingly,” he added for good measure. He demanded that the Gulf kingdoms must close all US bases on their territories or “those bases will be attacked.”
He also pledged to continue blocking the Strait of Hormuz, which is the direct cause of the worsening plight of many Indian businesses and households that are running out of gas. He flexed his muscle within six hours of his appointment. Massive missiles carrying up to 80 cluster bombs pierced Israel’s formidable air defences to hit Tel Aviv and other cities, while more drones hit Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered lashing out by a dying regime. They reveal a careful strategy of widening and lengthening the conflict to force its much more powerful US-Israel foes to change their calculus.
Given such awful prospects, it’s time for Delhi to vigorously gather the Global South and anyone else to place immediate pressure on all the warring sides to de-escalate. A prolonged Hormuz shutdown will ruin their economies and could set back Indian growth prospects by more than a decade.