Coming Soon! Trump’s Favourite Ayatollah

I was trying to catch up with the TV news when my ex-professor friend Raghavan turned up one evening without notice. “I’m here for a meeting tomorrow,” he said, waving a bottle. “I thought I’d spend some time with you while I’m here.”

The TV was playing a news channel covering the war between Iran and US-Israel, which seemed to have settled into a sort of ding-dong battle, with each side claiming it had the upper hand.

“This is terrible!” Raghavan said as I muted the TV. “The Iranians are hitting back harder than America and Israel expected… And they’re not going to give up easily, no matter what it costs them.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“The regime in Iran has killed thousands of dissidents in the streets,” he replied. “Do you think they’ll mind losing some of their citizens to enemy bombs?”

I don’t understand much about why Trump and Netanyahu were going at the Iranian government, and was trying to wriggle out of answering that question when my wife Prita rescued me. She’d been in the back garden when Raghavan arrived, and came in to check if he needed anything.

She took up the conversational load. “Of course not,” she said. “A few thousand lives don’t matter to them. The trouble is that we don’t know whom the Iranians are going to fire at next.”

“Did anyone ever know?” I asked. “They’ve been hitting places all over West Asia. Hotels and airports and places like that.”

“They’re going to be even more unpredictable now,” she replied. “They’ve split their forces into 31 provincial groups, all equipped with missiles and drones, and the commanders of these units are free to choose their targets.”

At this point the bell rang again: Murthy’s nose had brought him home at just the right time. I led him in and brought him a fresh glass while he caught up with the conversation. By the time I filled his glass for him he had caught up but didn’t say anything, just listened carefully.

“What about the aircraft carriers and their overloaded restrooms?” I asked, remembering something about a ship called the Gerald Ford and a T-shirt in its sewage and 45-minute queues before the toilets. Like in the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

“They seem to have sorted that out,” said Raghavan. “But they have other problems. The carriers are keeping their distance from the Iranian coast to stay out of range of Iran’s anti-ship missiles. Besides, they’ve used up large parts of their stocks of munitions and jet fuel, and they can’t restock at the US base in Bahrain because that’s been attacked.”

“So it’s not going as well for the Americans as Trump claims,” said Prita, looking at the ticker tape on the bottom of the TV screen saying that Trump claimed that Iran had been largely flattened.

“It isn’t,” said Raghavan. “Trump’s lying, as usual. And sneaky about boots on the ground.”

“They’re not planning on putting their own soldiers in Iran, are they?” asked Prita.

“Of course not!” said Murthy, speaking for the first time. “They’ll use others, as usual.”

“Surely not the Israelis,” said Prita.

“No,” replied Murthy. “Iran has several ethnic groups that don’t like the regime. The Azeris in the north, the Baloch in the south, the Kurds to the west. Trump hopes that the Pakistani Baloch will join the Iranian Baloch, the Iranian Kurds the Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, the Iranian Azeris the Azeris of Azerbaijan…”

“Right,” said Prita. “But while all these groups wait to go into action, oil prices are going up, and oil importers like most of us are facing inflation — all because oil tankers can’t go through the Straits of Hormuz.”

“That’s what it means to be a superpower,” Raghavan said. “You don’t care who else you trouble just as long as you hit your enemy.”

“So, who’s the real enemy?” I asked.

“Some people say China,” replied Raghavan. “Iran used to sell China oil. The Chinese may be the manufacturing hub of the world but their factories halt when their oil runs out. They’ve already lost their Venezuelan supplies after Trump kidnapped Maduro. Losing Iranian oil will hit them even harder.”

“Will the Americans get control of Iran’s oil?” I asked, wishing it weren’t all so complicated.

“Trump must be hoping for something like that,” replied Raghavan. “Essentially, he’ll want to make the Iranians pay for their own destruction by foreign boots. All on a pretext: he says it’s because Iran has a rogue nuclear program, and, besides, sponsored terrorist groups all over the world.”

“One sad thing,” said Murthy, emptying his glass, “is that this might all be because Trump couldn’t keep his trousers buttoned up.”

“How so?” asked Prita and Raghavan together.

“They say Netanyahu has dirty pictures of Trump on Epstein’s Island,” replied Murthy. “So Israel dragged America into its war with Iran. But what saddens me more is that the Iranians could have avoided this whole mess so very easily.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Look at the Pakistanis,” said Murthy. “They have a rogue nuclear program, and they’ve helped the North Koreans to develop another rogue nuclear program. They’ve been sponsoring terror groups ever since the Soviets moved into Afghanistan back in the early 1980s. No sanctions for them. Instead, arms and IMF loans.”

“The Iranians could have copied them. They only had to propose Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, offer to invest a few hundred million in his cryptocurrency, and give him space in downtown Tehran for another edition of Trump Towers. If they’d done that, Khamenei would have been Trump’s favourite ayatollah!”

“Which brings us to the question: Is Trump’s favourite ayatollah coming soon?”