George Bush Jr – Blood and Porridge

March 7, 2026March 19, 2026

The missiles are flying… Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

© Paramount Pictures / Dino De Laurentiis Company

With Donald Trump enacting his latest insanity – joining forces with Israel and bombing the bejeezus out of Iran, which has prompted the latter country to retaliate by firing ordinance in all directions and lighting up the Middle East like a Christmas tree – I find myself thinking of Greg Stillson, a character featuring prominently in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone (1979). In the David Cronenberg-directed movie version of The Dead Zone (1983), Stillson is played by Martin Sheen. It’s Sheen, as Stillson, who utters the quote that’s this blog-entry’s title.

Stillson is a psychotic bully who begins as a salesman, becomes a businessman and then a politician, and finally leads a populist movement that sweeps him into the White House. Well, he does in one timeline. Before winning the presidency, while he’s on the campaign trail, he shakes hands with The Dead Zone’s hero, Johnny Smith, who’s been blessed – or cursed – with the power to see into people’s futures just by touching them. He has a vision of Stillson’s future wherein, as a despotic and unhinged US president, he presses the buttons that trigger an apocalyptic nuclear war. Thereafter, Smith has to decide how he’s going to stop him. (Spoiler – he does, but with tragic consequences for himself.)

I don’t know if anyone with clairvoyant visions touched one of Trump’s little hands a couple of decades ago and witnessed him pressing buttons and wiping out humanity in 2026, the 250^th anniversary of American independence. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had.

Anyway, it doesn’t need saying, but Trump’s actions – which began on February 27^th, when in conjunction with the Israelis and under the moniker ‘Operation Epic Fury’, he had his military bombard Iran with missiles and drones; one source estimating on March 4^th that nearly 900 people had been killed so far, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – are a vastly bad idea for many reasons. Here are some of those reasons.

From wikipedia.org / farsi.khamenei.ir

One. The attack is illegal under international law. In the Conversation, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres have written that “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventative’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat.” However, they point out that “preventative war has no legal basis under international law. The UN Security Council did not authorize any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued.”

Two. The attack went against the American constitution. The American historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted on her Substack: “In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat. But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat. It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it ‘continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons’… The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man…”

Three. It’s likely Benjamin Netanyahu bounced the USA into the attack. Going back to Reason One, the supposedly ‘preventative’ nature of the USA and Israel’s assault on Iran is torturous to say the least. A few days ago, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States… We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

In other words.. We had to attack them before they attacked us, which they would surely do because Israel intended to attack them first. This means the USA’s vast military firepower isn’t actually under the control of the American commander-in-chief, but under that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The wily Netanyahu says ‘Jump’, the Americans say ‘How high?’

Four. Dodgy Middle Eastern deals are possibly involved. Who else, besides Netanyahu, has a finger in the pie here? In 2025 Trump did investment deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which he claimed were worth over two trillion dollars. Qatar saw fit to gift – some would use the verb ‘bribe’ – Trump with a 400-million-dollar Boeing jumbo jet that he plans to turn into a new Air Force One, making one wonder how much of these investments will be enriching Trump and his clan rather than the USA itself. Also, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff – the real-estate developer whom, laughably, Trump sent into negotiations with Russia about the Ukraine War even though he had zero diplomatic experience – have been in the Middle East lately as ‘envoys’, hawking the idea that the decimated Gaza should be reinvented as a luxury resort with ‘180 skyscrapers’ (and any remaining Palestinians, presumably, doing jobs like cleaning the toilets).

In the future, if a saner administration ever comes to power in Washington DC and launches an investigation into this debacle, it’d be wise to ‘follow the money’. I’ll bet at least some of the encouragement for this war came from business interests and wealthy leaders in the Middle East who regarded the Iranian regime as an undesirable neighbour, lowering the tone and property value of the area, and wanted it removed.

Five. It’s actually Operation Forget Epstein. Trump likes to distract. When the headlines look bad for him, he does something outrageous that generates different headlines – not necessarily favourable ones, but enough to banish the previous, bad headlines from people’s memories. This works especially well in our screen-obsessed, social-media-fixated era where attention-spans are short.

On February 25^th, the New York Times published a report under the headline EPSTEIN FILES ARE MISSING RECORDS ABOUT WOMAN WHO MADE CLAIMS AGAINST TRUMP. This mentioned documents “released by the Justice Department” that “briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor.” Yet other documents relating to these allegations have been withheld or removed from the public database about Trump’s paedophilic, sex-trafficking old buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

And two days later, the assault began on Iran. Funny, that.

From wikipedia.org / © Jesse Monford

Six. There’s no plan and no objectives. The George Bush Jr-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which toppled Saddam Hussein but created massive instability and led to huge numbers of fatalities – estimates of which range “from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 1,033,000 excess deaths (per the 2007 Opinion Research Business [ORB] Survey)” – was a ruinous fiasco. It was also built on the lie that Saddam possessed ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. But compared to Trump’s Iran incursion, it looks like a masterpiece of planning.

For one thing, to have a plan, you actually need to have objectives, i.e., things to plan towards. Trump and his cabinet apparently have no idea what the goal of all this is. Rubio, as we’ve seen, has said they’re waging war simply because that’s what the Israelis are doing. Meanwhile, Trump has suggested at one point it’s to achieve regime-change in Iran and replace Khamenei with someone more compliant to US interests, as was allegedly done in Venezuela after the abduction of its former president, Nicolas Maduro. Though the other day Trump admitted there was a problem with this because his airstrikes had killed all the possible candidates to take over: “…none of the people we had in mind are going to come to power, because they are all dead.” No, so far, that doesn’t sound like a brilliantly executed plan.

Trump has also claimed the war is to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons, even though after the USA carried out a bombing raid on Iran in June last year he was adamant that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” Trump has tried to justify this new war by saying Iran was – here plucking a figure out of his arse – ‘two weeks’ away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Elsewhere, it’s been suggested the war is to encourage the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime that’s oppressed and abused them for 47 years; to stop Iran sponsoring terrorism; and to destroy Iran’s navy. But most likely it’s because Trump woke up the other morning, looked out of the window and thought, “Gee, this would be a good day to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.”

Seven. This sort of thing has been tried before. Vietnam… Afghanistan… Iraq… Libya.

Eight. Possible destabilization of the Middle East. Even if by some fluke Iran ends up with a Trump-and-Netanyahu-approved government, it’s difficult to see how it can impose order on a country so diverse and, after all this devastation and upheaval, febrile. Iran’s population is 61 percent Persian, 16 percent Azerbaijani and 10 percent Kurdish, and the rest of it includes people like Lurs, Arabs, Baloch, Arabs and Turkish groups. While it’s overwhelmingly Shia Muslim, 9 percent of the population are Sunni and other sects of Muslim and there are also Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews and Sabean Mandeans. That’s before we get to political differences. Has anyone in Washington DC considered this? I doubt it.

Civil war in Iran could have devastating consequences for the Middle East. We’ve already seen the current conflict’s knock-on effects on the world’s oil supply, especially the disruption of tanker-traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, and on air travel, with more than 20,000 flights grounded and a million people stranded around the world since late February. The Middle East going J.G. Ballard is not good news for anyone. Well, apart from Vladimir Putin, who’ll see an increase in demand for Russian oil.

Nine. China may be thinking, “Hold my beer!” Trump’s rhetoric about attacking Iran sounds uncomfortably like Putin’s excuse for invading Ukraine in 2022 – his goal was to ‘demilitarise’ and ‘denazify’ the country. I also suspect China is watching keenly and wondering how it could cook up a similar motive for taking over Taiwan in the future.

Incidentally, Taiwan is the world’s foremost producer of Artificial Intelligence chips and according to the New York Times, without those chips, “the tech industry and the US economy would be crippled.” Haven’t thought that one through either, have you, Donald?

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

July 28, 2020

George, where did it all go wrong?

© The Belfast Telegraph

Last Thursday saw the Prime Minister of England – sorry, Prime Minister of Britain – Boris Johnson arrive in Scotland for a one-day charm offensive. This was intended to remind Scottish people of how lucky they were to be part of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the ‘mighty’ union as Johnson grandly put it, and dissuade them of any mad notions of voting for Scottish independence, which, according to recent opinion polls, 54% of them are now minded to do. Determined to press the flesh with the maximum number of Scottish people during his visit, Johnson flew into the bustling Caledonian metropolises of the Orkney Islands and RAF Lossiemouth. A little unfortunately, the Orcadian mainland is home to a small settlement called Twatt, which led to some unkind quips being made on social media about there already being ‘one Twatt in the Orkneys’. It was also slightly unwise for the PM to parley with some local fishermen and pose for photographers holding a pair of clawed, antennae-ed crustaceans, as social media was soon heaving with comments about how he ‘had crabs’.

But Johnson isn’t the only British political chancer to have foisted himself upon Scotland recently, proclaiming the message that red, white and blue unionism is good while Saltire-waving indie is bad. For July 2020 has seen the return to Scottish soil of one George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway. Or to give him the title that immediately appears when you type his name into Google, ‘George Galloway cat.’

It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time I considered Galloway one of the good guys. Well, one of the goodish guys at least. This was while he served as Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead, later Glasgow Kelvin, from 1987 to 2005. For many years Labour MPs formed the bulk of Scotland’s representation in the House of Commons, but apart from a few high-fliers like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and George Robertson, destined for cabinet jobs under Tony Blair, they were an uninspiring lot – a big, grey Scottish-accented blob whose only function was to shamble through the voting lobbies at their party’s bidding. They were nicknamed the ‘low-flying Jimmies’, though to my mind they were a living, if barely sentient, definition of the Scots word ‘numpties’.

However, the Scottish Labour MPs contained a small but interesting awkward squad. The squad included the admirably his-own-man Tam Dalyell; and the very leftward Ron Brown (who shocked the British establishment by heading off to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and then on his return warning that it probably wasn’t a good idea for the West to fund the Mujahideen, later to morph into the Taliban); and the trio of Dick Douglas, John McAllion and Dennis Canavan, all of whom would later end up estranged from the Labour Party and end up supporting the cause of Scottish independence. Plus, of course, the ultra-awkward George Galloway.

Galloway was too left-wing for traditional mainstream Labourites’ liking, which was fine by me. I also approved of his constitutional stance. Though he didn’t go as far as espousing independence for Scotland, he advocated a large measure of home-rule for the country within the framework of the UK. And when John Major’s Conservative Party won the British general election in 1992 and dashed hopes of a devolved Scottish parliament being set up for at least another half-decade, and a campaign movement called Scotland United was formed to maintain pressure for the creation of such a parliament, I wasn’t surprised when Galloway became one of the movement’s leading lights.

From twitter.com/thoughtland

To keep the issue in the public consciousness, Scotland United held rallies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I participated in a couple of these, though I can’t remember Galloway addressing the crowds. I do remember, however, one Saturday marching down to Leith Links in Edinburgh where, after speeches, we were treated to a gig by the Scotland United-supporting pop / soul band Deacon Blue. At one point, singer Ricky Ross pointed out the nearby premises of Leith’s Conservative and Unionist Association and started singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which contains the pertinent lyrics, “…how does it feel / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown…?” The memory makes me nostalgic. Trying to establish a Scottish parliament by having Deacon Blue sing Bob Dylan at the Tories. Those were the days.

Still, it was already clear that Galloway had a dodgy side. From 1983 to 1987 he’d served as general secretary of the British charity War on Want and stories of his antics during a conference in Greece – Galloway confessed to getting to know some local ladies ‘carnally’ – led to embarrassing tabloid coverage. I seem to remember one newspaper reporting his attempts to justify his behaviour with the headline I BONKED FOR BRITAIN. This presumably helped give rise to Galloway’s nickname ‘Gorgeous’. Meanwhile, his simultaneously smooth and self-righteous manner caused a lot of people I knew, even ones who shared his politics, to profess that they hated his guts.

During the next two decades, following Galloway’s exploits was a seesawing experience. He’d do something crap, then redeem himself by doing something impressive, then blow his restored credibility by doing something crap again. At the crap end was his grovelling to the Iraq despot Saddam Hussein, which in 1994 saw him utter the famous line, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Later, Galloway claimed, not very convincingly, that he’d aimed this line at the long-suffering Iraqi people rather than at Saddam himself.

But he deserved kudos for his opposition to George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair’s misguided, mendacious and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. He denounced Bush as a terrorist, got himself expelled from the Labour Party, sued and won against the Daily Telegraph after it claimed Iraqi agents had secretly paid him with cash from the United Nations Oil for Food programme, and then squared up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in 2005. The senate confrontation was probably his finest hour. He gave those senators a mauling. “…(I)n everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right,” he declared, “and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

Though he’d torched his bridges with the Labour Party, Galloway managed for a time to defy Enoch Powell’s famous adage that ‘all political lives… end in failure.’ He formed the Respect Party, stood for election in the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and won it from Labour. He stood down as MP there following a schism in the Respect Party, but in a 2012 by-election pulled off a similar stunt by winning Bradford West from Labour. Both constituencies had sizable Muslim communities and there were copious allegations about Galloway dishing religious-related dirt on his opponents – that in Bethnal Green he’d played up the fact that the Labour incumbent, Oona King, had a Jewish mother; that in Bradford West he’d raised the issue of the Labour Party’s Muslim candidate drinking alcohol; and that in the run-up to the 2015 general election he’d accused his Labour challenger, another Muslim, Naz Shah, of supporting Israel and lying about an arranged marriage. But Shah had the last laugh because she won Bradford West back for Labour.

© Channel 4

True to form, Galloway’s 2005 triumph in Bethnal Green was soon negated by his idiotic decision to take part in the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother. This resulted in such colossally cringy moments as George, no longer so gorgeous, dancing in a leotard beside the late Pete Burns of the band Dead or Alive, or pretending to be a cat and licking cream off the lap of actress Rula Lenska. Hence the word ‘cat’ popping up beside his name on Google searches.

More seriously, Galloway secured a job as a host on the Iran-government-funded Press TV in 2008 and that same year earned himself the ire of gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell for claiming that a gay man executed in Iran was punished for ‘sex crimes’ rather than for being gay. He landed himself in more hot water in 2012 when he defended Julian Assange against rape charges by describing having non-consensual sex with a sleeping woman (after consensual sex with her when she was awake), which Assange was accused of doing, as ‘bad sexual etiquette’ but ‘not rape’.

Galloway’s support for Assange was evidence that, as the 2010s progressed, he was increasingly happy to clamber onto any bandwagon that he thought would boost his profile. So he campaigned vociferously for a ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence – ‘just say naw’. Mind you, he was scathing of his ex-comrades in the Labour Party who’d joined forces with the Conservatives in the anti-independence Better Together movement. “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative,” he told Prospect magazine, “please shoot me.” Remember those words. Prior to the referendum, I watched him in a televised debate and discovered that, like a cartoon character, he’d now acquired a costume, a rarely-off-his-head fedora, and a catchphrase: “That is nonsense on stilts!”

Perhaps upset that his contribution to saving the United Kingdom didn’t result in ennoblement by a grateful David Cameron – he could have been Lord Galloway of Nonsense-on-Stilts – George then threw his lot in with the Brexiteers and campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016’s referendum on that matter. This spawned some nauseating photographs of him, a supposed socialist, posing with Nigel Farage, ex-City of London spiv, immigration dog-whistler and Donald Trump’s biggest British fanboy. That said, pictures of Galloway embracing the extreme right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon at a debate in Kazakhstan in 2019 were even more mind-melting.

The increasing number of causes that Galloway hitched himself to seemed in inverse proportion to the number of votes being cast for him in elections. A 2011 attempt to get into the Scottish parliament saw him win a less-than-awesome 3.3% of the vote in Glasgow. His performance in the 2016 London Mayoral contest was even worse (1.4%) and attempts to run in English constituencies in the 2017 and 2019 general elections had equally dire results.

Now George has a new wheeze, which is to run in next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections as head of something called Alliance for Unity, of which he says: “We have only one goal – to get the SNP out.” To this end, Galloway has declared himself willing to work with even the Conservatives. Yes, this is the man who a half-dozen years ago invited folk to shoot him if they ever saw him do that.

He intends to stand in the south of Scotland, a rural, down-to-earth area where I can’t see many people falling for his self-serving, narcissistic brand of bullshit. Maybe he figures he stands a chance because he shares a name with one of the regions there, Dumfries and Galloway. And who does he really expect to vote for him? Not Scottish independence supporters, obviously. Labour supporters will hardly vote for someone so willing to climb into bed with the Tories. And the hard-line loyalists / British nationalists who increasingly form the main support for the Scottish Conservative Party these days will hardly be enamoured with someone who’s said of Northern Ireland: “There is no Northern Ireland. It is six counties in the north of Ireland. It should have never been in the British state in the first place.” Nor will his urging of Arabs to kill British troops in Iraq in 2003, one of the final straws that got him chucked out of Labour, win him their admiration either.

George Galloway may still look, talk and act like the cat that’s got the cream. But I suspect he’s now used up the last of his nine lives.