Editorial: The desperation to flee Trump's war

Donald Trump’s ill-advised war on Iran has plumbed absurd depths with reports emerging in the past few days that living conditions on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln have become so bad that a few sailors jumped overboard out of desperation.

The ship is currently active in the Arabian Sea enforcing America’s naval blockade of Iran.

Having had no port call for nearly nine months, sailors on board are enduring shortages of fresh food and basic supplies like toiletries, broken-down sanitation facilities, and myriad other maintenance issues.

While media in the US is debating this as a mental health problem, Pentagon officials stonewalled queries about morale on board and put it down to the Lincoln’s extended length of stay at sea.

A relief carrier, the USS George Washington, is being sent to take up blockade duties so that the beleaguered ship can go back to its base, San Diego.

There is compelling irony in this abject retreat: Here’s the much-vaunted carrier of a superpower a floating airbase with 75 fighter jets carrying advanced missiles steered by sophisticated guidance systems retreating for want of fighting spirit, and deodorant, from an adversary that has no air force or navy. The irony is starker when you consider Trump’s boast this week that he plans to capture islands in the Gulf and make the Strait of Hormuz a US territory.

The image of hapless sailors jumping ship serves as a sumptuous metaphor for an unjustifiable war brought about by a deranged leader upon the instigation of a genocidal ally the same friend whose ‘intelligence’ forced him to make an undignified exit from the NATO summit in Ankara last month, holed up in a catering truck while his ministers flew out on a decoy Air Force One, copping the risk of an alleged Iranian shoulder-fired missile hit. The massive arsenal available to the American President, the asymmetric threat to him from a minnow power, and the Keystone Cops response of his administration all conspire to make this war rather a ridiculous one.

However, much as the US media might frame this as a mental health issue among a few vulnerable sailors, it masks two deeper truths. One is that the poor sailors aboard Lincoln might have endured more had they seen some moral purpose, even from a white man’s burden point of view, in this war. That there is none is clear to all except the war establishment in Washington, and their allies in Israel. Far from being cowardly, the sailors were exercising a healthy response to a corrupt war. As Joseph Heller tells us in his novel Catch 22, the urge to flee a war, especially a corrupt war, is the product of a rational mind.

The other fact all this focus on ‘mental health’ is masking is the enormous damage Iran has done to American military bases in West Asia. The Lincoln cannot be serviced and restocked at ports in the region because early in this war, Iranian missiles put the US Fifth Fleet’s military base in Bahrain out of service and then laid waste to the Fujairah base in the UAE.

As a result, Lincoln’s logistics hub was moved 2,200 miles away to Diego Garcia. But restocking and replacement of personnel is not an option even then. Beyond the desperation of a few sailors, America’s allies in the GCC are witnessing the humbling of a superpower.