Iran – 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

December 10, 2022December 10, 2022

Remember the Ally-mo

© BBC

It’s come to my attention that a football World Cup is in progress. Time, then, to dust down and repost the following item, which surfaces on this blog every four years when the competition is underway to decide the global champions of the ‘beautiful game’.

One unsettling feature of growing older is that when an anniversary arrives and you think back to the original event, you feel shocked when you realise how much time separates now and then. The other week, the 2022 World Cup competition began in Qatar, and it’s just occurred to me that the 1978 World Cup in Argentina took place 44 whole years and eleven whole World Cups ago. It’s almost traumatic to realise how much time has elapsed.

However, if you’re old enough to remember the 1978 Argentinian World Cup and you were in Scotland at the time, you’ll testify that the event itself was traumatic.

For those of you who’re unacquainted with the topic… What happened in 1978 was that of the four national football teams in the UK, Scotland was the only one to qualify for Argentina. And the country had a team that, on paper, looked like it might achieve something. It boasted players from some of the mightiest football clubs in Britain: for example, from Manchester United (Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Lou Macari, Joe Jordan), Liverpool (Graham Souness, the legendary Kenny Dalgleish), Glasgow Rangers (Derek Johnstone, Tom Forsyth, Sandy Jardine), Nottingham Forest (Kenny Burns, John Robertson, Archie Gemmill) and, er, Partick Thistle (Alan Rough). And in charge of these remarkable players was a manager called Ally MacLeod, who was remarkable in his own way. Though not necessarily in the right way.

From the Independent / © Getty Images

Ally had been emboldened by wins in 1977 over the European champions Czechoslovakia and over the Auld Enemy, England. The game against England concluded with the Scottish fans swarming onto the pitch at Wembley and digging up clods of the turf and breaking the goalposts into wee pieces to bring home as souvenirs, much to the horror of the English commentators and much to the hilarity of everyone in Scotland. He then began to talk up his team’s chances in Argentina. When early in 1978 Scotland failed to win the Home International championship involving England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ally shrugged it off with the tantalising comment that the championship’s title “could be dwarfed by the World Cup.” Such statements, and Ally’s general air of swagger and optimism – “My name is Ally MacLeod,” he announced when he became Scotland manager, “and I am a born winner!” – acted like catnip to both football fans and the hacks working on the sports pages of Scotland’s newspapers.

As the World Cup approached, a heady sense of expectation began to infect the Scottish population. Folk started to believe that the Argentinian World Cup would be a jamboree of Scottish footballing genius, culminating in Ally and the gang lifting the trophy. No wonder a carpet company cannily signed Ally to do a commercial where he sat on one of their rugs whilst dressed as a gaucho, which was 1970s Britain’s idea of what everybody in Argentina looked like. This led to a priceless incident where, just before he departed for Argentina, Ally was accosted by an exuberant fan who announced, “Ally, see the day after your commercial? My ma bought one o they carpets!”

Ally was indeed a great salesman. He could truly market the brand. Unfortunately, that was not quite the same as delivering the goods.

Even one of my favourite rock bands, the Australian (but mostly Scottish-born) AC/DC, got in on the act and played a gig in 1978 at Glasgow Apollo Theatre wearing Scotland football strips. Also getting in on the act was the Scottish comedian Andy Cameron, who recorded a song called Ally’s Tartan Army that soon rode high in the charts. It contained such catchy, if posthumously cringeworthy, lines as: “And we’re fairly shake them up / When we win the World Cup / Cos Scotland’s got the greatest football team!”

From pinterest.co.uk

Being in Scotland in the spring of 1978 and watching this happen was disconcerting for me. The year before, my family had moved from Northern Ireland and taken up residency in a farm near the Scottish town of Peebles. I’d assumed that the Scots were a stoical, down-to-earth lot, not given to flights of fancy. But then, all-of-a-sudden, they’d succumbed to this madness about Ally MacLeod, winning the World Cup and having the greatest football team in the universe. What was going on? I found it particularly noticeable the day before Scotland played Northern Ireland in the Home Internationals. When I walked into a meeting of the local Scouts that evening, all the other (Scottish) scouts had an insane glint in their eyes and were gleefully predicting how Scotland was going to slaughter, dismember and stomp on the grave of poor, lowly Northern Ireland the next day. As it turned out, all Scotland could manage with Northern Ireland was a 1-1 draw, much to my satisfaction.

Still, over time, the madness seemed to seep into even my non-ethnically Scottish soul. Hey, I thought, it would be cool to live in the country that’d won the World Cup, wouldn’t it?

After a delirious send-off at Hampden Stadium where 30,000 Scotland fans whooped and screamed as if their team had just come back from Argentina clutching the World Cup trophy, Ally’s Tartan Army flew out and got ready for their first game of the competition’s first round, which was against Peru. The evening that the game was on TV, I missed the beginning of it for my dad had sent me out to move some cows from one field to another. I was in the middle of moving those cows when I heard a huge rumbling roar. It was like how I’d imagine the approach of a tsunami to sound. I needed a few seconds to realise I was hearing cheering coming from the town, a half-mile away beyond the last of my parents’ fields. It was the sound of 5000-odd people in Peebles celebrating Joe Jordan knocking in a first goal for Scotland in the game’s 14^th minute. Gosh, I thought, it’s started. Scotland really are going to win the World Cup!

I completed my task, hurried back to the house and hunkered down in front of the television next to my younger brother, who’d really caught the Scotland World Cup bug and was watching the match with avid excitement. Scarcely had I arrived there when, just before half-time, Peru equalised. Then in the second half Peru scored two more, so that by the game’s end Scotland had been beaten 3-1. In a pathetic attempt to hide my disappointment, I pretended that, being Northern Irish, I hadn’t really been supporting Scotland and I thought their defeat was funny. So I turned around and started laughing at my brother. I stopped, though, when I realised he was in floods of tears. However, my mother had already seen me laughing at him and she gave me a deserved bollocking for making him even more upset.

Next up for Scotland was Iran, an unstable country in the early throes of a revolution. Scotland was surely going to win this one, right? Wrong. The team played so badly that they scraped a 1-1 draw and that was only because an Iranian player called Eskandarian scored an own-goal. This game was famous for its images of a totally-deflated Ally Macleod sitting hunched over in the Scotland dugout, his hands clamped over the top of his skull in an attempt to shut out the world – “Ally trying to dismantle his head,” as one wag described it later.

To heighten the misery, the Scottish striker Willie Johnston was sent home after failing a drugs test. Other football players have suffered drugs scandals, most notably the cocaine-snorting Diego Maradona. But the hapless Johnston wasn’t even caught taking a glamorous, hedonistic drug. He tested positive for Reacitivan, a medication prescribed to him because he had hay fever. Poor old Willie might as well have been busted for taking Benylin Chesty Cough Mixture.

By now the Scotland situation was looking grim. Also grim was the atmosphere at Peebles High School. One guy in my class told me there was a record shop in Glasgow that was now selling copies of Ally’s Tartan Army by Andy Cameron for a penny each, so that disgruntled punters could make a public display of smashing them into vinyl slivers on the pavement outside. Meanwhile, a girl told me she couldn’t bear to drink Scotland’s national fizzy drink Irn Bru any more, because its name sounded it too much like ‘Iran Peru’. Lessons with our English teacher, Iain Jenkins, strayed off the topic of Shakespeare and became lengthy post-mortem discussions about what was going horribly wrong in Argentina.

In fact, I remember us doing some creative writing one day and then Iain Jenkins reading out a poem that a mischievous pupil from south of the border – England – had just penned about Scotland’s faltering World Cup campaign. It contained the memorable line, “Poor Ally will have to emigrate to the moon” and the even more memorable couplet, “Willie Johnston is over the hill / That’s why he’s on the pill.”

To get through to the World Cup’s next round, Scotland now had to beat the Netherlands… and beat them by three goals. There seemed zero chance of that happening. From the dire way the Scots were playing, it looked much more likely that the Dutch would murder them. Yet it was against the Dutch – who’d eventually make it to the competition’s final – that Scotland managed a victory. Indeed, they were 3-1 up at one point in the game and if they’d knocked in another goal they could have lived to fight another day. Alas, it wasn’t to be. The Dutch eventually pulled one back, making the final score 3-2. Scotland had won, but not by enough to stop them going home early.

Still, the game produced a brilliant Scottish goal by the diminutive Nottingham Forest player Archie Gemmill. It was the best goal of that World Cup and possibly the greatest World Cup goal ever. Incidentally, it’s also the goal whose footage is intercut with the hectic sex sequence in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1995). No wonder a dazed Ewan MacGregor murmurs at the end of it, “I haven’t felt that good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978!” Though I’m pretty sure that back in 1978 the Scottish football commentator Archie Macpherson didn’t really exclaim, as he does in Trainspotting, “A penetrating goal for Scotland!”

Thus, Scotland was out of the World Cup but with, technically, a wee bit of pride salvaged. Sadly, such was the hype that’d accompanied them to Argentina that their campaign didn’t feel like anything other than an absolute disaster. The day after the Holland game, I remember a classmate, the local postman’s son, coming into class. He pulled out a tartan scarf, waved it around for five seconds and said flatly and unenthusiastically, “See that? We beat Holland. Magic.” Then he put the scarf back in his bag and zipped it up again. And nobody at school seemed to talk about Scotland, Argentina and the World Cup ever again.

Mind you, later that summer, I returned to Northern Ireland for a holiday. People there seemed to view me as 100% Scottish now and they didn’t stop tearing the piss out of me about how crap Scotland had played in Argentina.

From twitter.com

But let’s be fair to Ally MacLeod, who died in 2004. In popular Scottish mythology he’s often depicted as a vainglorious balloon, bragging that his team would win the World Cup, and then win the next World Cup, and probably the Ryder Cup, the Stanley Cup, the America’s Cup, the Ashes and the Tour de France as well. But I’ve scoured the Internet and been unable to find most of the hyperbolic quotes that I’ve heard attributed to him. It’s fairer to say that he made a few tactless comments and exuded a lot of optimism, which the overheated imaginations of fans and journalists turned into mass hysteria. In the dispirited environment of post-World Cup Scotland, though, nobody wanted to admit their own culpability and poor Ally became the scapegoat.

Anyway, if you can ignore the hubris and focus only on the football, Ally’s 1978 squad didn’t do that badly. Yes, they had two duff games but they only lost one of those, and then they achieved a win against the eventual finalists. If the cards had fallen differently elsewhere in their first-round group, they might have got through to the competition’s next stage; and, having had their wake-up call, performed better. Other teams in other World Cups have done so with the same first-round record of one win, one draw and one defeat – including England.

Much has been blamed on that ill-fated World Cup campaign. People have found significance in how it came shortly before the 1979 referendum on creating a devolved Scottish parliament, which died a death because of apathy. The Scottish public voted for the parliament, but not in sufficiently high numbers. It’s tempting to join those two dots, but I’m inclined to blame this collapse in Scottish political willpower at the end of the decade on factors a lot more complex than Ally MacLeod bullshitting us a bit about football in 1978.

One thing that can be attributed to 1978 is the evolution of the Scotland football team’s travelling support, the Tartan Army. Thanks to the bitter lessons learnt then, modern Scotland fans have dumped any belligerent, nationalistic sense of expectation and have gone about the (often thankless) task of supporting Scotland with humour, irony, self-deprecation and a determination to have a good time no matter how bad the results. As a result, they’re now one of the most popular sets of fans in the world.

Actually, when Scotland played England several years ago at Wembley, I saw a picture of some Scottish fans posing in Trafalgar Square with a life-sized cut-out of Ally MacLeod they’d brought along. That made me smile. With his erratic management skills and over-exuberant PR skills, the daft bugger put us through the wringer in 1978. But it’s nice to know his spirit still gets invited to the party.