So life is good. Unless you’re a Spurs fan. Or an Arsenal fan. Or a West Ham fan. (Wolves and Burnley fans don’t count; they don’t live round here). And if you just ‘put yesterday’s match’ into the deepest, furthest reaches of your mind; where you never look. When you force those thoughts away into those hiding places in your head where you keep the lists of things to do that your wife gives you every week; never to be considered again, then the world can seem bright, like the sunshine all around us.

Except the Middle East. That’s never happy. And I don’t get it. Not that they’re not happy, I really get that. Bombs and missiles and running in and out of shelters all day would make clown rip his hair out in anguish. Ok, rip his silly curly wig off, same difference. But what I don’t get is how they started a war with undefined goals. Or defined goals which changed daily. Or goals with shifting goal-posts. And without doing their due diligence..

Essentially, war is scientific. Not the fightin’, that’s just the mechanics. You plan a war. You know what your enemy has in his ‘arsenal’ (not ‘that’ Arsenal, bunch’a losers, the proper one) and you know what it is prepared to do to stop you and how you can overcome such events. And you work out the probabilities and so are prepared.

So the plan seemed to be: we’ll attack Iran to depose the regime/prevent nuclear threat/because they’re smelly Iranians. And once we’ve sent a few missiles over, the ‘masses’ (non-regimists) will just rise up, overthrow the IRCG and raise the flag of old Persia. What could go wrong?

No-one seemed to plan for the ‘regime’ to not just roll over and give up at the first whiff of missile fuel. The projected possibilities never seemed to include closing the Straits of Hormuz, which Lila and Joey could have told them was way more inevitability than possibility. But Lila and Joey don’t have the teams of war strategists that America has and Israel certainly has. Nor the ‘war games’ computer models. Even though Joey wants one for his birthday.

So Trump has now said that if they don’t open the Straight, he’s gonna bomb the entire energy supply network for all of Iran. To which Iran replied that the Strait is not actually closed, for traffic from its friendly, nasty horrible, allied nations, but only to ‘the enemy’ nations, like us. But if Trump bombs, the Straight will be totally closed.

Meaning shipments of oil, mainly, but also food, fertiliser and a million essentials, will become scarce and unavailable. Like petrol. Farmers can’t farm. Heating can’t work. Lights go out.

This is Trump’s ‘are you feeling lucky, punk?’ moment. Who blinks first.

Happy Monday (long as you hide all the shit)

A xxxx