I’m old enough to have grown up during the Vietnam War when a song by Barry McGuire included the unforgettable lyric: “The Eastern world, it is explodin’, violence flarin’, bullets loadin’ / You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’.”
If you substitute Middle Eastern for Eastern, the lyric seems to apply as much today as it did in the 1960s. Ask the Saudis, whose airports are being shuttered and whose travelers are being killed by Iranian-backed Houthis and their missiles.
Meanwhile, Trump claims that U.S. forces have opened the Strait of Hormuz to oil tanker transit, but Iran says otherwise. According to the head of the Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC), Ali Ozmaei:
“If the Americans think the Strait of Hormuz is open, let them come closer. We are impatient to sink American warships. We are waiting for U.S. warships to approach the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz so we can sink them. We are counting down every moment until this happens.”
The song lyric can stretch over to the Western World as well, as Ukraine and its energy resources continue to be hit by Russian missiles despite President Trump’s Saturday boast that an energy ceasefire had been reached between Russia and Ukraine.
It would take almost a decade after McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” aired nationwide for the Vietnam War to be drawn to a close, at least for U.S. forces. The fighting would continue between North and South, until the communists in the North took over the entire country — three decades of U.S. efforts to the contrary wasted, along with 50,000 American lives.
It’s still too early to know what will happen in either Ukraine or the Middle East, but Trump’s wishful boasts don’t seem to be having the effect he intended. The Strait of Hormuz is not fully open, oil prices continue to rise, and Russia and Ukraine continue to bomb the hell out of each other.
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY THE SONG:
