American hubris, US-Israel’s unwinnable Iran war, and Anura’s confused neutrality

Opposition Leader and SJB leader Sajith Premadasa signs condolence book for Iran’s Spiritual Leader Ayatollah  Khamenei, martyred in a US-Israeli airstrike

SLPP National Organiser Namal Rajapaksa signs condolence book

Rev. Jesse Jackson with President Fidel Castro

Despite US constraints, the NPP Government’s clandestine defence agreements, and Zionist inroads and influencers, Sri Lanka and its people remain essentially and spontaneously what they have always been: autonomous, sovereign, humanistic and humanitarian

“…The only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” 

—US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, CBS 60 minutes

I’m proud of the ethos of my country. Sri Lanka behaved better than incomparably wealthier and more powerful India, in the matter of the US submarine attack on the Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean. (https://www.facebook.com/share/v/16KtbwxVQk/)

The needle of Sri Lankan sympathy and solidarity flickered to Iran whose supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated by the US-Israel. 

The entire Opposition, initially and most notably Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, but also Namal Rajapaksa and Dilith Jayaweera, as well as the clergy of all four major religions on the island including the Catholic and Christian churches, signed the condolence book for the martyred Ayatollah Khamenei at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Sajith Premadasa called on the Government to condemn, jointly with the Opposition, the US-Israel war on Iran, so that the world can see a unified stand by the Sri Lankan Parliament. The Government ignored his offer. 

Centrist SJB parliamentarian Mujibur Rahman assailed the Government for the delay in rescuing the sailors of the Iranian ship torpedoed by the US submarine, most of whom drowned. (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/IRIS-Dena-attack-Iranian-sailors-died-due-to-multiple-injuries-drowning/108-334887)

Civic organisations in Galle donated food to the survivors and the refrigeration equipment for the retrieved bodies of the dead Iranian sailors. 

After some delay and dithering, President Anura Dissanayake followed the national mood generated by this island’s ethos and permitted the evacuation of the sailors of the second ship as well. 

The Sri Lankan navy was seen rescuing the Iranian sailors, serving them hot, sweet, ‘milk tea’ and administering medical checkups. 

Despite US constraints, the NPP Government’s clandestine defence agreements, and Zionist inroads and influencers, Sri Lanka and its people remain essentially and spontaneously what they have always been: autonomous, sovereign, humanistic and humanitarian.

Bombing campaigns don’t create supporters on the ground of those destroying the country from above; they discredit such supporters, enhance hatred of imperialism and Zionism, and reinforce the resolve of anti-imperialist resistance. Invaders are hardly ever welcomed by the local people

‘Neutrality’ confused

President AKD’s got the whole ‘neutrality’ thing scrambled. For sure, we are and must be neutral in the context of this war, in that we are not allied to either warring side. But that should not make our foreign policy that of neutrality. Still less does it make Sri Lanka “a neutral country”. 

On matters of principle, we cannot remain neutral, even while we adopt a neutral stance in this or any particular war. 

We cannot remain ‘neutral’ in the face of the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran, the murder of its leader, Trump’s absurd insistence on choosing Iran’s leaders, or the Israeli doctrine of assassinating every Iranian leader.

This distinction is not mine—it is it is the principled perspective articulated by SWRD Bandaranaike when addressing the UN General Assembly in 1956. There was no Nonaligned Movement at the time, because the NAM was yet to be born in Belgrade in 1961, with Ceylon as a founding member. What we had was the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the group of Afro-Asian nations dubbed ‘neutral’ by the Western press. Bandaranaike spoke in the complex context of dual crises: the UK-French-Israeli invasion and seizure of the Suez canal and their war against Nasser’s Egypt on the one hand, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary on the other. He was hardly equidistant and slammed the UK-French-Israeli aggression while being more nuanced, muted and modulated about USSR/Hungary. 

Above all, SWRD drew the important distinction which President AKD and the NPP Government have utterly failed to grasp, between ‘neutrality’ and ‘uncommitted’. In this landmark UNGA speech Bandaranaike strongly emphasised that  “poor, small” Ceylon, like the other newly independent countries of Afro-Asia which had assembled in Bandung, was far from an “uncommitted” nation, and rather, was “committed to the hilt!” on matters of principle such as sovereignty, independence and peace.

While Cyprus is still struggling with the presence of RAF bases stemming from the Independence agreement of 1960, Ceylon under the new SWRD Bandaranaike administration kicked out the RAF from Trincomalee and Ratmalana in 1956, just as Sri Lanka under President Premadasa despatched the IPKF and removed the Israeli Interest Section two decades later.  

The Trump administration has dumped the late Prof. Joseph Nye’s notion of the crucial importance of ‘soft power’: the ability to persuade through the appeal of one’s ideas, the attractiveness of one’s culture, and the credibility of one’s narrative beyond one’s own constituency. The US under Trump has decided that ‘hard power’ i.e., military coercion alone, is sufficient, and melding hard power and soft power into ‘smart power’ is superfluous 

Truly transformative 

Professor Emeritus Jayadeva Uyangoda was never as theoretically rigorous and conceptually precise as when he told the latest issue of the Jaffna Monitor that “the NPP Government is transformative”, rather than either “revolutionary” or “merely reformist”. 

In my lifetime, this country’s Foreign Ministers most notably ACS Hameed and Lakshman Kadirgamar sometimes cracked jokes which evoked laughter at international forums, but nothing any Sri Lankan foreign minister said was ever regarded as unintentionally hilarious, and they were themselves never publicly laughed at in any international forum. Until now. I cringed while watching Foreign Minister and senior JVP-NPP personality Vijitha Herath speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, hearing the gently mocking witticism and part mimicry by a chuckling Dr Jaishankar, and the loud extended collective guffaw of the audience. That’s real ‘transformation’.

On 4 February Independence Day and again on 8 March International Women’s Day, I realised that we are the only country that hasn’t seen its First Lady and doesn’t know who she is. That’s ‘transformation’ too. 

Why Trump-Netanyahu won’t win

The Trump-Netanyahu war will not achieve its stated objective of absolute victory and the total defeat of Iran. I know this because I have lived through US history from the 1960s.  

President Kennedy headhunted Robert McNamara from Ford and made him Secretary of Defence. He was the ‘wizard’ who introduced computers into the Vietnam War. The bespectacled McNamara spearheaded the strategy of the US war in Vietnam through the JFK and Lyndon Johnson administrations. His televised press briefings on the war were polished performances with which those of US Secretary of War, the much tattooed, crude and brutal Pete Hegseth of limited vocabulary, are incomparable. 

Hegseth boasts about the use of the B2 and B1 strategic bombers over Iran. McNamara sent flights of B-52s on daily bombing runs over Vietnam. The 8-engined B-52s comprised the long-range strategic bomber fleet built for nuclear war against the USSR. They were deployed against Vietnam, a poor Asian nation mainly of peasants.  

An analytical man, McNamara commissioned in 1967 a research study by the first US think tank, RAND Corporation which had been created by the US Air Force, on the ongoing conduct of the Vietnam war and the efficacy of the methods used. Leaked in 1971 by lead researcher Daniel Ellsberg to the New York Times, the study became the legendary Pentagon Papers.  

The most crucial revelation of the research study was that years of daily bombings including by fleets of B52s, and the ubiquitous use of napalm, white phosphorus and Agent Orange by Phantom F4C and F105 Thunderchief fighter-bombers, signally failed to achieve the core strategic goal of breaking Vietnam’s will to resist.

McNamara resigned and went on to head of the World Bank, in which he did very well, having undergone a Pauline conversion and become an enemy of poverty, not the poor and poor countries. Such career change isn’t open to Hegseth. 

An even more impressive figure ran the war during the Nixon administration: National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger. He used the B52 strategic bomber fleet even more widely and frequently than McNamara did, and yet the USA lost the war.

The iconic Ho Chi Minh died of natural causes in 1969 but his successors defeated the USA by 1975.  

George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, no McNamara still less a Kissinger but a smart man nonetheless, wryly confessed during the Afghanistan war that the US Air Force and Navy had “plumb run out of targets to hit”. That was in 2001. The US withdrew from Kabul decades later. 

The Gulf Arab states have dovetailed with the US-Israeli war on Iran, just as much of today’s ASEAN covered itself in ignominy by positioning themselves on the wrong side of the Vietnam War, allying with the USA and its South Vietnamese puppet administration.

The US-Israel war on Iran will run out of targets to hit from the air and sea in weeks or months. Iran would not have surrendered. Iran’s will would not have been broken. What then?

If Trump is smart, he can claim a win, threaten to return (with the Schwarzenegger line “I’ll be back”), but stop his war. But if he isn’t smart, he will be suckered by Netanyahu, the former Shah’s son, and Rubio-Hegseth-Huckabee ‘Christian-Zionist’ eschatology. He will climb the escalation ladder and send in ground troops (preceded by Special Forces) to root out the regime and replace it with a compliant client administration. 

That will begin the end of the Trump presidency, Republican party presidential prospects in 2028, and Marco Rubio’s imperial dream enunciated at the Munich Security Conference to European applause, of restoring the Golden Age of 500 years of Western domination over the world which had sadly been ended by “World War II” and “anticolonial uprisings”.

Trump thinks the US military will be considered liberators  by the Iranian people, but any supporters of the former Shah will find themselves surrounded by a sea of enraged patriotic Iranian people, following the brutal US-Zionist bombing. Bombing campaigns don’t create supporters on the ground of those destroying the country from above; they discredit such supporters, enhance hatred of imperialism and Zionism, and reinforce the resolve of anti-imperialist resistance. Invaders are hardly ever welcomed by the local people.

Arming the separatist Kurds of neighbouring Iraq and sending them on a ground incursion into Iran is also unlikely to be welcomed by the majority of Iranians. 

Iraq was a partial, tenuous exception because Saddam Hussein represented a Sunni minority ruling a Shia majority. Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite, and the US-Israel axis murdered their 86-year-old spiritual leader in the month of Ramadan.

Germany and Japan, defeated by the US, became closest allies—and Trump expects Iran to follow suit. But much of the German Wehrmacht had been smashed by the Soviet Red Army which had broken through to Berlin. The Truman administration’s horrifying decision to drop the atom bombs caused Tokyo to surrender. Though the Trump administration may consider tactically nuking Iran, the radioactivity will be carried on the winds throughout the Gulf and that prospect will deter the US.  

Iran’s ground forces and the IRGC remain essentially intact and functional, and with or without missiles, are capable of fighting at close quarters which neutralises US-Israeli airpower. At close range, the morale of the fighter on his/her native land and fighting to defend it is the decisive factor.

Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon has rekindled in the residual Hezbollah its original role as national resistance movement. It now posts (hitherto uncontradicted) videos of ambushing Israeli tanks at close-range. It has engaged in combat a helicopter-borne IDF raid, preventing the Israelis from securing the corpse of a soldier who had died in 1986. It has rocketed the Zionist settlement of Kiryat Shmona. It has fired rockets into central Israel. Most significantly, Hezbollah has killed two Israeli soldiers with an anti-tank rocket fired at an armoured IDF bulldozer in Southern Lebanon, and damaged an IDF helicopter too.

In a surge of American imperial hubris, Trump demands Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and the role of selecting its leadership. Scornfully defiant under massive US-Israeli bombing causing black rain over Tehran, Iran has picked Ayatollah Khamenei’s second son Mojtaba Khamenei. Massive crowds have enthusiastically endorsed the announcement.

Meanwhile public opinion in the world’s most populous Islamic state, Indonesia, has forced Jakarta to reconsider its presence and participation in Trump’s billion-dollars-per-head Gaza Peace Board.

Usually, US presidents commence wars which are initially popular at home but become unpopular over time, when the body-bags start coming home. President Trump has begun a war which only a 1/3rd of Americans support. That’s unlikely to increase or prove sustainable.

Despite reports in the Western media including CNN and BBC which concluded that the attack that killed over 168 Iranian children and 14 schoolteachers in Minab at the start of the war was a US Tomahawk missile strike, Trump insists that it was by the Iranians, due to their faulty missiles. If Iranians believed that, they’d be protesting or cursing their Government in the hospitals or while mourning. Nobody has or is. 

The Trump administration has dumped the late Prof. Joseph Nye’s notion of the crucial importance of ‘soft power’: the ability to persuade through the appeal of one’s ideas, the attractiveness of one’s culture, and the credibility of one’s narrative beyond one’s own constituency. The US under Trump has decided that ‘hard power’ i.e., military coercion alone, is sufficient, and melding hard power and soft power into ‘smart power’ is superfluous. 

In this, the United States under Trump and the Republicans is imitating Netanyahu’s genocidal Israel. However, Israel only needs to militarily dominate its neighbourhood. It does not need to lead and cannot. Leadership requires the consent of the led. The US aspires to lead the world and the region, including Iran. It will fail to do so through hard power alone, and the rest of the world will not find its current narrative credible. Never before has the US begun a war without the shred or even a pretence of logic, morality and ethics—and only with the arbitrary exercise of overwhelming kinetic lethality. 

While resistance against imperialism is usually powered by nationalism/patriotism, in Iran it is fuelled by multiple sources: 

 Nationalism/patriotism. 

The self-confidence of a large country with 92 million people and an ancient 6000-year civilisation. 

A martial, theistic, globally far-flung religion with a tradition of martyrdom. 

The militancy of an authentic, ‘national-popular’ founding Revolution: 1979.   

Zero ‘soft power’ on the US side and the multiple ‘soft power’ sources/factors (listed above) on the Iranian side, is why the US-Israel will fail. 

Rev. Jesse Jackson was a figure in my life from my teens. I recall him with Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro. Had he been alive and well, Jesse Jackson would have been in the forefront in America’s struggle already beginning in its city streets, against the morally monstrous Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran 

Jesse Jackson and ‘My America’ 

Nothing I’ve written here must be misunderstood as anti-American. I watched the proceedings of the funeral of Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago. It wasn’t just for the music, with Stevie Wonder performing and Jennifer Hudson memorably singing Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. 

I watched the full speech (“Send me, Lord!”) of President Barack Obama, and most of Kamala Harris, Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa who had travelled to Chicago for the funeral. 

Trump-Hegseth-Rubio don’t represent either the cowboy/gunfighter ethic or Lincoln’s Union armies. They represent the America of the Confederate flag and KKK lynch-mobs.  

The Chicago funeral of Rev. Jesse Jackson was a mirror of the other America; the one I am so familiar with, have lived and studied in (as a Fulbright scholarship winner), visited and travelled across several times, understand, relate to, bond with, and am a product of. I was in Chicago during the Harold Washington campaign Barack Obama referred to in his funeral oration. 

Rev. Jesse Jackson was a figure in my life from my teens. I recall him with Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro. Had he been alive and well, Jesse Jackson would have been in the forefront in America’s struggle already beginning in its city streets, against the morally monstrous Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran.   

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