While it feels like July 1914, Trump Ponders Pressing Fast Forward a year.

The original version of And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, sung by its author Eric Bogle, who emigrated from Scotland to Australia at the age of 25 in 1969, going on to become one of his adopted country’s best-known folk singers. The song is about the British military disaster which played a major part in forming Australia’s unique national identity, and it is on the verge of becoming the most topical folk ballad of the decade.

Why? Because, as classic mission creep lures the increasingly deranged megalomaniac deeper and deeper into the Iranian morass, Netanyahu’s puppet President is openly considering a land war to try to force the Straits of Hormuz.

We’ve been here before, back in 1915, when Winston Churchill got his way and British and ANZAC troops were landed in the Dardanelles Straits in Turkey. The aim was to capture the Gallipoli peninsula, the result was a conflict which was staggeringly costly and futile, even by the standards of World War One.

The parallels are frightening close. Where Netanyahu/Trump began with an air campaign which would do the whole job, the Dardanelles were supposed to be forced purely with naval firepower. Only when this failed did the Powers That Be decide to send in ground troops, throwing them against Turkish troops who, although inferior in equipment and despised as supposedly inferior specimens, were well dug-in, motivated to defend their homeland, and very brave.

If Trump does put thousands of American boots on the ground, his betrayed country is likely to see a wave of body bags which could dwarf Iraq, or even – if the survival of Israel makes in impossible for any bought-and-paid for American president to get out – Vietnam.

In fact, because such a landing would necessarily involve bringing a massive fleet close in towards Iran’s surviving missile systems, some thousands of American sailors would probably never even be brought home for the Arlington Cemetery burials the country has come to regard as ‘normal’ in conflicts post-1945.

“Crushed by the Wheels”, Civil War bubble gum trading card. Set first issued in the USA in 1962 to commemorate the centenary of the start of the War Between the States. Issued in Britain in 1965 and avidly collected by small boys delighted by our mothers’ horror at the blood and gore. Apart from seeing war up close and personal, becoming a father and grandfather seems to be the best cure for the common young male tendency to romanticise armed conflict.

Perhaps that’s the key point in all this. Trump’s vainglorious folly brings us very close to the end of the post-1945 world which we all regard as ‘normal’. The wheels of History, virtually frozen for decades, are now turning ever quicker. The only question is who they will crush.

If Donald doesn’t wise up PDQ, declare victory and leave, it could very easily be the USA and NATO. It couldn’t happen to a worser bunch of war profiteers, foreign agents and career psychopaths.

It is unlikely to be Iran which, I predict, will still be there, however battered, and perhaps even somewhat radioactive, when the United States of America has become just another past empire which choked to death on immigration, its own arrogance and the Babylonian Woe of debt-created finance.

The Dardanelles – a Personal Interest

Men of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers in the final, futile assault on Turkish lines, shortly before the disastrous campaign was abandoned and the survivors were evacuated.

By the way, I declare a personal interest in this. As a regular army cavalryman in 1914, my Grandpa Ted Griffin was among the very first British troops out to France in August that year. He took part in the desperate fighting in the First Battle of
Mons, before the front settled down to the long war of attrition, by which time his regiment had been converted to infantry.

In July 1915, he received news that his older brother William, a Saddler in the Royal Horse Artillery, had died of wounds in the North London hospital to which he had been evacuated with his third ‘blighty’ injury.

Ted was given seven days compassionate leave for the funeral. When he returned to the trenches, he found that all his comrades had been shipped to Gallipoli while he was gone. He was duly transferred to another unit and stayed on the Western Front for the rest of the war. The unit he would have been with at Gallipoli, had his brother not died, was virtually annihilated by the stiff Turkish resistance as the doomed offensive ground on. Had it not been for the loss of my Great Uncle Bill, I wouldn’t be here now.

By the end of the war, Ted so loathed the British Army and its murdering upper echelon officers that he refused to collect his medals. Before his death in 1988, as he watched what was happening to Britain, he said that, if they had known how it would turn out, none of the mates he knew and lost would have gone to war.

That, of course, was an even more widespread sentiment among the British veterans of WW2 who lived long enough to see things get even worse. There’s a lesson in that for today’s young men: The only war worth fighting is a civil war which is forced upon you, or against an actual invasion of your country.

In any other case, leave it to the sons of the rich and powerful. Starting, in Iran, with Barron Trump, and in Ukraine with the Starmer brat.

https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/fools-and-history-trumps-gallipoli