On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. The name for the current war, Operation Epic Fury, certainly sounds more like a teenage boy’s idea of comic-book armageddon. So it is instead, according to Trump, an “excursion”, or “our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran”. Vladimir Putin, who calls his four-year war on Ukraine a “special military operation”, would approve. The “secretary of war”, especially, is addicted to virtue signalling, as long as the virtue being signalled is martial.

Source: The Guardian April 05, 2026 04:31 UTC