A war of indistinct origins, its aims unclear, wends its way to an uncertain outcome. The US-Israeli attack on Iran dominates our news coverage this weekend as our correspondents at home and abroad seek to make sense of a crisis that is reverberating far beyond the theatre of war itself.
A week after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and, separately, the killing of 175 schoolgirls in an American missile strike on a primary school in the Iranian city of Minab, the war has spread beyond the Middle East to the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow gateway to the Persian Gulf through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil flows, is all but closed as shipping companies suspend operations that are no longer insurable. Oil and gas prices have spiked and they could rise further if the conflict lasts more than three weeks or if energy infrastructure is damaged, threatening to drive up inflation. Foreigners are scrambling to get out of Gulf cities that have been targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
As Denis Staunton writes in his assessment of the conflict, nobody can predict when the war will end, “not least because nobody, including Donald Trump, can say for certain why it began.” The US and Israel may be acting together, he says, but their interests are not the same and their war aims may diverge.
In her opinion column, Lara Marlowe suggests the Trump administration is not only the most mendacious and corrupt in US history but also the most incompetent. “The Roman emperor Caligula made his favourite horse a senator. Trump sent his wife Melania to chair a UN Security Council meeting on children,” Lara writes. “‘The US stands with all the children throughout the world,’ she said, around the time the Iranian schoolgirls were being buried.”
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In his piece on the war’s impact on global energy prices, David McWilliams observes that in a world fixated on tech and AI, we forget that most of the economy is still “heavy, dirty and smelly” and that “transportation rather than data is still the life blood of commercial life.”
Elsewhere, Conor Pope asks how the war will affect Irish consumers, looking at everything from home heating oil to mortgages; Jack Horgan-Jones takes us inside the Irish Government’s response to the crisis; and Raymond Barrett, author of a book on the “Dubai dream”, notes that making a long-term commitment to expat life in the Gulf always required a degree of compromise, sacrifice or self-delusion, but the time for self-delusion has passed for the Irish and other immigrants who set up in the region.
In domestic news, the former European commissioner Phil Hogan is attempting an improbable political comeback six years after he stepped down over a changing account of whether he complied with Covid restrictions after flying into Ireland. Jack Power has the story on his campaign to lead the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. And after a week in which infighting at a State fisheries body came out in public, Martin Wall has the background.
A Fine Gael TD has a plan for something called an American Presidents’ Trail, a tourist wheeze he thinks will appeal to visiting Americans. But will people really visit a Richard Nixon interpretive centre outside Naas, asks columnist Mark O’Connell.
Elsewhere, Róisín Ingle asks some well-known women what advice they would give their younger selves; Patrick Freyne speaks to Cillian Murphy about one of his great loves – music – while Ian O’Riordan tries Lidl’s new super shoes, which will have runners sprinting to the middle aisle.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic
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