TODAY may prove to be a dangerous day for the Middle East.
If the United States and Iran do not watch their words and deeds, that is.
On this day last year, US President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of one of Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani, not far from Baghdad's International Airport as he flew in for a meeting In Iraq.
Assassinating a public official in peace time is unlawful under international law. As on that occasion, Trump is war mongering now.
On Wednesday, the US flew B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf close to Iranian waters claiming to deter Iran from attacking American assets. If The New York Times is right, Wednesday's B-52 mission is the third in six weeks. If this is not enough, armoured vehicles are also heading to Iraq, to create the clime of war.
With less than three weeks left of his much-disgraced presidency, is Trump hurrying a war with Iran? Is the temperamental Trump inventing a reason as former President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, did to bomb Iraq? Or is this yet another way to sabotage President-elect Joe Biden from concluding a nuclear treaty with Iran, as some analysts think? Either way, it will be bad for the US and the Middle East.
Here is why. Take the US first. The US is the most militarily powerful nation in the world. Until such time China stands up to it, say a decade or two from now. Very conscious of this, it begins and ends wars as it pleases. In the Pentagon book of war, all the president has to do to start a war is invent a danger, as Bush did in Iraq.
Or drop nuclear bombs to end one, as was the case in Japan. This breeds hubris of the geopolitical kind.
And geopolitical hubris costs money. Besides causing damage to the American psyche, it is a great strain on the nation's coffers.
To maintain the pretense of an infallible America, the military spends nearly a trillion dollars a year. In one calculation, the US military budget for October 2020 to September 2021 is estimated to be US$934 billion.
And this huge sum of money, doesn't include the cost of waging wars. For this, The New York Times dishes out a bomb of a figure. Taking just 18 years, the newspaper says, the US spent a staggering US$4.9 trillion waging wars. If future care of war veterans is included, it tuns into a nation-bankrupting tally of another trillion dollars more. With boots in 90 countries, and fighting unwinnable wars in some, what else can the Americans expect.
And yet this is a nation that says it can't afford medicare for all or free college for its citizens. This is how bad a warmongering US has become. A brawling US is also bad for the Middle East. The unending carnage in Iraq is how miserable a meddlesome US can turn a region into.
In assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil, the US has given the Iraqis one more reason to want its military out of the country. Most Arabs and Iranians will welcome such a withdrawal. So must Americans.
Without a meddlesome America, the Middle East will be less of a muddle. And the US, too, will be better off, with happier Americans on medicare and free college. Bullets did no one any good.