Monday 2nd March, 2026
We are witnessing a new world order that is anything but rules-based. The US has once again demonstrated that might is right. Big powers have placed themselves above international law and reduced the UN to a mere spectator.
US President Donald Trump has graduated from abductions to assassinations in dealing for foreign leaders he considers hostile. The US and Israel seem to think they have succeeded in engineering a regime collapse in Iran by assassinating Supreme Iranian Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and scores of others in a series of air strikes on Saturday. Those killings must be condemned unreservedly. President Trump has audaciously claimed in a social media post that a wicked man was eliminated. The question is whether those who ordered Saturday’s air strikes, killing many Iranian civilians, including schoolgirls, can consider themselves any less wicked.
If history is anything to go by, air strikes alone cannot bring down long-established systems, and there is no guarantee that the toppling of a repressive regime always yields positive results and helps bring order out of chaos. Iraq and Libya may serve as examples. They remain fragmented and are in a far worse situation than they were under Saddam Hussain and Muammar Gadhafi respectively. The US and its allies plunged those two countries into anarchy in the name of eliminating repressive regimes.
The US and Israel are accused of waging a diversionary war for the benefit of President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both of them are facing scandals at home. Trump is troubled by a renewed scrutiny of the Epstein files and a Supreme Court judgment preventing him from imposing tariffs according to his whims and fancies. Netanyahu is facing bribery and fraud charges, and will be in serious trouble if voted out of power. He has to cling on to power at any cost. Fighting wars purportedly to save Israel seems to be the only way he thinks he can keep his political enemies at bay at home.
Iran has threatened to destroy Israel and the US, but its military capabilities are limited, as is known to military experts. It would never have taken on the US militarily or done anything fraught with the danger of triggering disproportionate military retaliation. It has been nowhere near developing nuclear weapons. The casus belli that Trump and Netanyahu used to attack Iran reminds us of the falsified intelligence dossiers President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair unashamedly produced in a bid to justify the invasion of Iraq. They said Saddam Hussain had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, but they could not trace any.
The current Iranian regime, whose crackdown on protesters claimed thousands of lives, has weakened international opposition to US aggression significantly. However, some prominent Democrats have already condemned Trump’s bombing spree. U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin has pointed out that Trump’s military action is illegal in that according to the US Constitution, if the President wants to start a war, the Congress, elected by the people, needs to sign off on it. He has said the Senate needs to come back immediately to vote on Trump’s senseless and illegal bombings. The Republicans have defended Trump’s military aggression, claiming that it is in the interests of the Iranian people.
One can only hope that the US Congress and judiciary will make Trump act with restraint.
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Adopt QR remedy
The escalation of the Middle East conflict has triggered panic buying of fuel in Sri Lanka. Long lines of vehicles could be seen near fuel stations in various parts of the country at the time of going to press. The Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) had to step up fuel supply yesterday while claiming to have fuel stocks sufficient for more than one month and urging the public not to panic. The raging conflict is bound to affect the global fuel supply, and this is why Sri Lankans have panicked.
There is no reason to doubt the veracity of the CPC’s claim that it has sufficient fuel stocks, but panic buyers are impervious to reason. Unless hoarders are kept at bay, the CPC will run out of its stocks soon. One may recall that during the 2022 economic crisis, pumps ran dry at most filling stations mainly due to excessive hoarding. Rationing helped bring the situation under control.
The only way to stem the current wave of panic buying of fuel is to activate the QR-based fuel issuance system. Unless the government adopts that method forthwith and arrests panic buying, hoarders will have a field day and create a fuel shortage.
from The Island https://ift.tt/6ZHA8bq
