Editorial

War was what everyone expected during the charade of diplomatic negotiations between the US and Iran on the latter’s nuclear programme. When was the only question, and it came yesterday while the diplomats were still at the table.

Dogged at home by the Epstein files; a Supreme Court decision against his global tariffs war; besieged by fellow citizens opposing his immigration policies; and dipping in the opinion polls, the US President has taken up the common strategy adopted by leaders of militarily powerful nations – go to war to shore up domestic standing. And the Israeli PM had arguably similar domestic compulsions.

For some time, the US President has been targeting Iran, imposing sanctions, creating economic disruption that triggers internal dissension, encouraging its citizens to do the work for him – overthrow the regime by popular upheaval. He said, “Help was on its way,” but it never did, and cost many lives. The primary justification for the attack, according to him, is to “defend the American people from threats from Iran“—an effort to legitimise it according to existing rules of preventive strike, as it has been characterised also by Israel.

Canada and Australia appeared to agree with the US-Israeli justification, while Norway’s Foreign Minister has refuted the claim of a preventive strike in this case as “not in line with international law. Preventive attacks require an immediately imminent threat“.

The primary threat is Iran’s perceived intention to build a nuclear weapon (an intention persistently denied by Iran), also its missile capability and its regime, prompting calls for accompanying regime change.

The justification of a ‘preventive strike’ is almost a carbon copy of former President George Bush Jr’s rationale when he invaded Iraq in 2003 on the grounds it had WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), but there is one difference. President Bush was compelled to at least go to the United Nations and invoke international law to win over sceptics at home and abroad who were strident in their opposition to a ‘preemptive’ invasion of Iraq.

The war that was launched yesterday has no formal reference to justify it by existing international law, the UN or Congressional approval. The silence from across the Atlantic has been deafening. The Europeans seem so paralysed over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland and abandon Ukraine—the two issues they’ve fought him on—that they are fearful of voicing too many objections about going to war with Iran. European officials have urged diplomacy and restraint but have not openly condemned the possibility, now the occurrence, of a US attack.

The wider West Asian region has already been inevitably drawn in, with Iran’s retaliatory strikes on US bases in the region.

The pointing of the tariff gun through midnight tweets may be over for the moment, but the US Supreme Court has only held that the President does what he did, differently, and legally. The tariff war is not entirely over.

On Tuesday, the President was also very proud to say that during his time in office there has been a “tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God” framing the broader resurgence of white Christian nationalist politics that he has championed in the USA. And hence, justifying that borders must be reinforced against unrestricted immigration from the external lawless world of alien cultures.

And this message of exclusion and reinforced borders is spreading. In Munich, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently received a standing ovation when he advocated a reinvigorated transatlantic alliance based on Western civilisation, Christian heritage and cultural identity against the “forces of civilisational erasure which today menace both America and Europe alike“. And no leader from North or South expressed any outrage at that vision and yearning for a Western Empire.

In contrast to the applause for the messages of power and exclusion delivered in Washington and echoed in the heart of Western Europe, from another European city (Geneva), Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, reminded the world this week of an alternate vision – a vision that these same countries led by the US had aspired to build, having witnessed first-hand the horrors of unfettered power. A vision which protects the dignity and worth of the human person from oppression and embodies these aspirations in multiple multilateral human rights treaties backed by an international order based on international law.

The war across the Mediterranean and the Gulf countries in West Asia is not just about oil and nuclear weapons; it is yet another clash of civilisations. Thousands work in the region, remitting the money that has become the lifeblood for countries like Sri Lanka, including in order to survive debt and the IMF.

It is a war beyond this country’s remit, and all that Sri Lanka can do is simply watch, and wait, to see how it spins out.

Caught in the coalgate

It is hard to fathom what is more problematic about the Government’s controversial coal tender: the procurement or the attempted cover-up of the dirty energy source considered the largest single source of global environmental pollutants. It has now covered the Government all over with black soot, the byproduct from the incomplete combustion of the carbon-based fuel.

Rather than analysing and solving the problem, Government mouthpieces questioned how the document had leaked and why the new coal from South Africa was fed into the power plant when Russian stocks were still available.

Eventually, well after the matter had become politicised and impossible to ignore, the Government admitted there was “something wrong” with the coal but insisted there was no suggestion of fraud. This administration assumed power on a crystal-clear platform of ‘system change’. The coal fiasco is one example, if not of corruption, as is claimed, then of incompetence, a total lack of transparency, political meddling and avoidance—none of which is indicative of ‘system change’. Justifiable questions are being raised whether the CID takes only former ministers in for questioning.

The country is now in a fix, insofar as low-cost power is concerned. With discharge port tests contradicting Lakvijaya data on coal quality; with Lakvijaya producing less electricity than required; with the Government unable to cancel the tender (not only because of the discharge port test results but because there is just no time to unload before the monsoon); with no way of charging penalties from the supplier; and with the difference in electricity loss having to be made up possibly through high-cost diesel power, it is now a case of ‘damned if you do (cancel the remaining shipments), damned if you don’t’.