Rare topical post

The Machine War (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 12 – March 11th 2026)

Following on from last week’s post, I want to thrash out from uncertain evidence where things stand in the war as of today. Day 12 is a landmark because twelve days was the length of last year’s June conflict between the same antagonists. The day has come and gone with only the most unconvincing signals from the US president that there might be some dim prospect of a peace deal. But as I said last time, the basic strategic situation is: it’s the Iranian side who get to say when the war ends.

But it may be the end of the beginning. I think we are getting on towards the end of the first phase of the war, a machine war mostly of missiles, bombs and drones. The main questions in this first phase of the war are: what do the Iranians do when they run out of missiles? What do the US and Israelis do when they run out of interceptors? And who runs out first? A missile-interceptor gap in favour of Iran would mean a sudden ramping-up of damage to Israel, Gulf oil infrastructure and US bases. A gap in favour of the US means Iran’s chief offensive weapon is spent.

Where are we now?

Where do things stand right now in relation to this question? Almost nobody who knows anything valuable has any incentive to tell the truth. Here I will sum up the contradictory stuff I’ve read from various more or less non-credible sources.

  • That there are x5 fewer missiles than expected because Iran has lost so many launchers to air strikes.
  • That the US is pulling military hardware out of places like Korea and Ukraine to throw it into the Iran situation.
  • That the rate of Iranian missile fire has slowed a great deal since the start of the war.
  • That in comparison with last year’s 12-day war, fewer Iranian missiles are being launched – but they are causing more damage with the population of Tel Aviv being forced to run in and out of bunkers all the time.
  • That the Iranians are tricking enemy pilots by literally painting warplanes on runways.
  • That Tel Aviv is being hit really hard in the last four days, that the “Iron Dome” is breaking.
  • That US/Israeli planes are swarming the exits to Iranian bunkers, blowing up anything that pokes its head outside.
  • That civilian life in the Gulf has returned a good deal of the way to normal.
  • That Iran has pivoted to blowing up oil facilities in the Gulf.
  • That these attacks on oil facilities are not Iranian at all, but Israeli false flag operations (If the Gulf countries choose to do a deal with Iran in the future, they can all pretend to believe this).
  • That Iran is still holding back its biggest missiles.
  • That Iran can churn out Shahed drones at several times the rate that they are destroyed, and that these drones can do enough damage to make a big difference in the war.
  • That Iran can fight on at a fraction of the financial cost that the war is imposing on the US.
  • That the US side are not actually worried about running out of interceptors, only about leaving Ukraine exposed by overcommitting to Israel and the Gulf.
  • The US has not lost vessels. But that could be because their navy is hanging back and not committing itself to combat.
  • That the entire Iranian navy and air force have been destroyed, and 80% of air defences destroyed.
  • That 17 US installations in the Middle East have been damaged.
A Shahed drone shot down in Ukraine. Image courtesy of Npu.gov.ua

All of the above cannot be true. But some of it is. We have to use our own judgement. It appears to me that while the balance of fatalities is massively against Iran, the war is proving to be a massive logistical, political and economic challenge for the US.

What do we know for sure?

The outstanding fact of the war is that there has been a slaughter of civilians in Iran and Lebanon. Next in significance is the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, the mere warning of which has led to economic turmoil around the world. Moving on from warnings, today three ships were hit by Iranian weapons in the straits.

Incentives to de-escalate are not there. An initiative by the Iranian president to mend fences with the Gulf States was blocked by the military, with strikes continuing, for example on a desalination plant in Bahrain the very next day. Yesterday I saw multiple headlines about Trump saying peace was coming very soon, and I just find it both funny and irritating that there are still journalists hanging on every word out of Trump, as if this is a man who weighs his words for even a second before vomiting them up, or stays true to them afterwards.

The US/Israeli bombardment, with its toll in civilian lives, can carry on for, in effect, as long as the US population will continue to pay for it and to tolerate it morally. But Iran will run out of missiles or of launching capacity sooner than it runs out of resolve. From a two-sided air war it will become a one-sided bombing campaign like what the US did in Korea and Vietnam (without unseating a regime). The 12-day duration of last year’s war could indicate that this first phase, this machine war, might be reaching its limits. But assuming the two sides are better-prepared this time, it could go on for another week or two.

At the end of that period, a missile-interceptor gap in Iran’s favour would mean an episode of more serious damage being inflicted on US bases and on Israel. Such a ‘Tet Offensive’ moment, especially so soon after the outbreak of war, could have a huge effect on public opinion and mood. A missile-interceptor gap in favour of the US would, on the other hand, settle the air war into a one-sided conflict until such time as the Iranians can restore capacity – if they can restore capacity at all under such pressure.

Next post I intend to explore what a second phase of this war might look like, assuming that the first is coming to an end. To finish today, a note on the Iranian regime.

Iran: strengths and weaknesses of the regime

I said last week that Trump, Hegseth, Miller et al are fools. The Iranian leadership, on the other hand, are reactionary and ruthless, but they are not fools. Unlike the American and the Israeli leaders, they cannot afford to be fools. The Islamic Republic is deeply imbedded in society through a nearly fifty-year history. Iran’s strategic doctrine of distributed “mosaic” resistance and multiple designated successors for every position is an impressive response to the last quarter-century of a US and Israeli doctrine of blitzkrieg and assassination. In the future, the current war could be written up as an epic of resistance that could supply the clerical regime with a whole new legitimizing narrative that it can spin decades of mileage out of.

For what it’s worth, I don’t support the Islamic Republic regime – and I think any regime that Trump might install (or Biden, Obama, Bush or Lincoln, while we’re at it) would be a lot worse. A new regime emerging in a genuine way, from a popular uprising such as the Women, Life, Freedom movement, or from Iranian labour, would be a different story. To me this is a very simple point. It’s not complicated at all. Some people insist that any criticism of Trump’s idiotic war is a defence of the clerics. On the other hand I’ve noticed a semi-ironic identification with the Iranian regime from people who are simply relieved to see some powerful entity standing up to the US and Israel at long last.

Even taking into account the rounding effects of irony, I think this is unwise. Already the clerical regime is directing its propaganda appeal to the anti-Israel layers of MAGA more so than the progressive anti-war left.

Anyway, I don’t feel any need to wring my hands, accompanying any remarks with a token condemnation of the Iranian government for the sole purpose of covering my arse. That’s not why I’m writing this. But a relevant point, for my purposes, is to look at how the nature of the Islamic Republic might inhibit its ability to fight imperialism. On Drop Site News a week ago I heard an Iranian official using this war as a retrospective justification for the killing of thousands of protesters by the government in January in operations that were extraordinary in scale and ferocity. On the contrary, there must be severe confusion and demoralisation in the armed forces and among the public following the winter bloodshed. This kind of war demands the full mobilisation not only of the armed forces but of all of society.

I’m going to leave that point very general because of weaknesses in my knowledge of Iranian culture and politics. But as a general rule the nature of a regime has profound effects on how it fights a war. We can’t put the clerical authoritarian regime in a box and forget about it for military purposes. It will tell.

What advantages does Iran have in this war? (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 4, March 3, 2026)

The long-predicted US/Israeli war against Iran has begun. I will be at the anti-war rallies, just so you know where I’m coming from. But this post is going to address a simple question in a factual way with as little rhetoric and moral judgements as I can manage. So I regret that I’m going to be mentioning various reactionary chancers as if they are serious people whose words mean anything.

That question: What advantages does Iran have in the current war?

I don’t know who’s going to win this war. The advantages enjoyed by the US are obvious, and include a military organisation of peerless strength, practically unlimited material resources and the vocal support of governments around the world. But it strikes me that Iran enjoys many advantages that are not as immediately obvious but that carry great weight.

1: Home turf

This is not a war between peers of equal strength. But it is not ‘superpower versus dysfunctional geopolitical minnow’ either. This is a global empire versus a regional power.

It is obvious which side is stronger. But the stronger power still has to apply its strength effectively. Here, the aggressor’s supply lines are stretched while the defender has its resources and its population right there, to hand. The US has to bring its personnel half-way across the world and keep them supplied. An important regional power, with a well-educated population of 92 million and a strong military, can leverage this advantage.

On the other hand, the US has a vast apparatus of bases half-encircling Iran. There are 40,000-50,000 US personnel under Central Command (Centcom, covering the ‘Middle East’, Central Asia and Egypt). Centcom has existed since the early 1980s and has fought several wars. Bases housing up to 10,000 personnel have histories going back decades. So the war is not ‘US versus Iran, on Iran’s home turf’. It is Centcom (and tiny but heavily-armed Israel) versus Iran. This diminishes Iran’s ‘home turf’ advantage but not entirely. This apparatus of US bases has to be sustained from outside at great expense. If it expends a lot of munitions or loses a lot of soldiers or machines, these have to be made good across those long supply lines.

2: US military assets can become political liabilities

It’s not, in every situation, a good thing for the US to have a wealth of targets within range of Iranian strength. From his statements about the war possibly being over in two to three days, it’s clear Trump wanted another ‘one and done’ spectacle in Iran: strike hard, receive capitulation, declare victory, pick another country to shake down next. Hegseth’s remarks today acknowledge it will be a longer affair but insist that it won’t be Iraq.

If we can say that there is a ‘Trump doctrine’ of quick wars – one-night stands or weekend flings with no strings attached – then that doctrine has been exposed for its serious weaknesses. It demands that Trump pick his battles carefully, which he has not done on this occasion. And that goes back to those US bases.

On Day Two of the war I wrote the following note for this post: ‘It’s going to be the US asking for peace, this week or next – and Iran saying no, we won’t stop hitting Israel, hitting your bases, until we are convinced we are secure.‘ That’s in essence what has happened since I wrote that note. Trump made tentative peace overtures, the Iranians said no and kept shooting, and Trump and co started making different noises, saying the war would be four or five weeks, not three days.

Those US bases, to be clear, are a net negative for Iran. But in this situation, they are hostages. They mean that Iran can hit back, with no shortage of targets. The war ends when Iran says so, or when it has nothing left to throw at those bases. This is not a weekend fling. The US is committed, even though it didn’t want to be.

3: Iran’s back is to the wall

The US struck Iran without warning, in the middle of negotiations that appeared to be going well. Negotiating in bad faith and assassinating a leader who enjoyed considerable authority and prestige in his country and beyond – these things come at a cost. The twelve-day war last year (when Israel and Iran traded missile strikes until the US waded into the fray and bombed Fordow) saw Iran’s government take a moderate and cautious posture. This time Iran has retaliated, apparently without holding back.

I don’t know enough about Iran to advance a sweeping thesis about how its people will rally behind the government. The lack of military mutinies during the recent protests is an important sign that though the regime is widely hated it is not on the brink of being overthrown. Based on historical examples, I’d say that even many who hate the government would temporarily set aside their differences and get behind the war effort.

4: The US does not know what it is doing

The strategic aim of Israel is clear enough: destroy Iran as a regional power so as to institute US/Israeli hegemony unchallenged over southwest Asia. For this aim, regime change is not necessary. Chaos will suffice. Civil war will suffice. But Israel does not have a hope of achieving these aims without strong, active US backing.

So, does the US share Israel’s strategic aim, or is it in this for different ends? My impression would be that most of the US ruling class, beyond Trump, even beyond the Republican Party and into the Democratic leadership, supports this basic strategic aim. But unlike the Israeli population, the US population emphatically does not support this. Open pursuit of such sweeping war aims would lead to political crisis at home. Hence fake war aims concerning the protests which were crushed months ago and a non-existent nuclear weapons programme (which Trump apparently destroyed last year anyway, if anyone can remember that far back). There is a lazy conflation of conventional missiles and nuclear missiles. Even at that, nobody is fooled. The half-arsedness of the case for war is striking in comparison to the elaborate efforts made in 2002-3 to win public consent for the invasion of Iraq.

The US is in a longer war, like it or not. Iran has rejected peace overtures and escalated, because the Trump regime made a sham of diplomacy. Trump will escalate in turn, because he is not ready to make concessions and appear weak. Both sides have an incentive to escalate well beyond where we are now. But the Iranians know what they are fighting for. The Americans don’t.

And what are the US options for escalation? As I see it:

  • Bomb Iran on the scale that they bombed North Korea or North Vietnam
  • Foment civil war
  • Use nuclear weapons
  • Invade and occupy the country

The first two probably won’t work, but they will try them more likely than not. The third and fourth are obviously more than the US public will accept. That’s not to say I rule them out. Neither Trump, Rubio nor Hegseth has ruled out ‘boots on the ground.’ They would be fools to try and occupy the country, even with the aid of hypothetical Iranian allies (who have not yet materialized). The mountains of Iran would be the tomb of Trumpism. Then again, they are in fact fools.

5: US allies may not be as steadfast as they appear

The Gulf States and Jordan have adopted a public posture condemning Iran. But privately there must be fury toward Trump. They wanted the talks to result in lasting peace because peace is conducive to tourism and commerce, which are existentially important especially to the UAE. So will we see these Arab states kick out the US military bases? I doubt that. But I don’t think they’ll join in the war either.

At the same time, many will want to keep on good terms with the United States. There is widespread hostility to Iran in these countries. There is a basis for a perspective of staying in with the Americans and enduring several years of war in order to see Iran defeated. But then what? A collapsed Iran would be a source of endless instability and violence. Right now it’s all condemnations of Iran, but I’d say there’s a ‘Wait and see’ approach in terms of practical actions. If Iran doesn’t fold quickly, and I don’t think it will, the Arab governments might push the US for peace.

Open questions

This is a new and strange kind of war, an air and naval war, very technical on one end (ballistics, trajectories, etc) and very visceral on the other (devastating explosions, death, terror, destruction). It hinges on technical questions about the capabilities of missiles and drones and of the systems designed to intercept them. There are key questions here which only people with specialist knowledge can answer (I don’t have specialist knowledge). A good place to start for that: Military Realism has written on the limits of missile defence as well as about some of the technical questions relevant here. Meanwhile vital statistics and facts on Iran can be found in this detailed profile by Joseph Shupac at the Geographic Investor.

There’s a remarkable story about 2002 wargames conducted by the US military simulating a war with Iran. Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, playing as the Iranians, defeated the American side using, crucially, motorcycle messengers and small boats. It was partly with this in mind that I asked here on January 31st ‘how would things go in the US if some hundreds or thousands of naval and air personnel died in a couple of days?’ We are four days into the war, and US fatalities are in single digits while 500+ Iranian civilians have been killed according to the Red Crescent. It is unclear to what extent US facilities and materiel have been damaged. The advantages I have listed here will count for little if Iran is simply unable to impose sufficient costs on the US in particular. But there are costs other than human lives: in buildings destroyed, supplies spent, trade disrupted.

I have questions that the next few weeks will probably answer, but in the meantime I’d appreciate any comments that can address them. Can Iran sink US vessels? Can Iran withstand the economic cost of war? China and Russia joining the war seems very unlikely, but will they throw lifelines to Iran? What is the size of Iran’s arsenal, how much of it can be destroyed by air strikes, and how quickly can it be replenished? How much of that arsenal can the US and its allies absorb with interception systems – can they hold out for a few more days, or is it weeks or months?

Here is, not a prediction, but a scenario: three years from now the price of everything is through the roof. 50 Iranian refugees are being moved into a disused hotel down the road from your house. All the Trump admirers in your town are calling this an invasion.

Here’s another scenario: within the next couple of months, spooked by damaged bases, spent munitions, economic shocks and an anti-war mood, and with the Iranian state failing to collapse, the US backs down instead of escalating. The world is spared the many terrible consequences of the collapse of Iran into civil war and chaos, or of another long war on the scale of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Trump shakes hands with the new Ayatollah and declares that he’s a wonderful guy.

In Pictures: Welcome to the Interslop

Introducing a wailing Youtube therapist, my AI girlfriend and the serious social problem of bus theft.

People have been talking about this for a while but 2025 has been the first year that it really sank in for me: computers and the internet are getting worse, and you…

Hang on. What’s this now? I can’t see the words I’m typing. There’s a big charcoal-coloured box blocking my word processor.

I know I’m offline. I don’t want to see ‘my feed’, I want to see the words I’m writing.

It won’t go away. Does it go away when I click? No. Do I just have to wait?

I’ve figured out that mashing my keyboard keys makes it go away. But the point is, I don’t want to see ‘my feed’ when I’m trying to write. It’s very distra…

UFO CRASH-LANDS IN POLISH FIELD

KATE MIDDLETON’S HAIR IS A DIFFERENT COLOUR

BRUCE WILLIS HAS DEMENTIA

I’M 42 AND ONLY ATTRACTED TO MARRIED MEN

7 SIGNS THAT SOMEBODY LIKES YOU ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGIST

FLIGHT ATTENDANT WARNS PASSENGERS: THIS IS THE SEAT YOU SHOULD NEVER SIT IN

10 ACTORS WHO HAVE AGED TERRIBLY

6 THINGS YOU HAVE TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY SOLAR PANELS IN IRELAND

THESE 5 FOODS WILL KILL YOU INSTANTLY

Oh look, I’m online now. And ‘my feed’ has popped up again. Ugh. It’s a load of clickbait… Wait. Bruce Willis? No, poor guy…

Shit. What was I going to write again?

I guess I was going to talk about how the internet is shit, how we are descending further every day into the Interslop. And I was going to illustrate it with some screenshots.

Like this one. More AI slop from ‘history’ pages. Yes, that man has horns. And the text whitewashes what was probably mass sexual slavery. And AI layers this earth-toned grit all over everything that just makes it all the more creepy and uncanny.

But it’s not just AI. And not everything has gritty dirt tones. Now when I want to open a PDF document on my phone, I have to sit through a video ad that usually looks something like this:

Jesus. Hasn’t the internet gotten really tacky? Just vulgar. And when it’s not tacky, it’s weird.

For example: If I’m listening to something on Youtube these days, I get sudden interruptions from a man’s voice wailing at me. And before I show you the screenshots I want you to read the words he wails. Please keep in mind that these words below are sung as if they are song lyrics, in a way that’s anguished, high-pitched, melodramatic and breathless:

…procrastination is a trauma response, not laziness… warning signs of dopamine-chasing behaviour in men… how hypersexuality and procrastination are interconnected…

So many questions. First, is this really happening, or am I hallucinating? Well, I took some screenshots so I know it’s real. Next question: why is this apparition saying this to me? Why does the algorithm think I want this? Who thought it would be good to put these words to music? I don’t leave it play til the end because it’s too unsettling, so I don’t even know what it’s an ad for. But it appears to be for some mental health or counselling app. Let that sink in: this is supposed to be good for mental health!

While we’re on the subject of ‘why did Youtube think I wanted to see this’ – introducing my new AI girlfriend:

Well. She seems nice.

Youtube also thinks I want to see an ad for a new AI programme that can create songs.

If it’s ‘very scary’, why is she smiling? Even the most pro-AI people appear not to be sure how they are supposed to feel about it.

In other internet news, Facebook now has ad breaks, which I like because it encourages me not to be on Facebook. It’s a little speed-bump on the mindless scrolling. But like everything, Facebook also now has prompts to use AI at every turn.

So you don’t have to write Facebook comments anymore. You can just sit back and let the bot answer on your behalf. But, well, there never was any obligation to write Facebook comments. If you don’t like doing it, you could just not do it. So who is this for?

But bless you, chatbot. You’re here to reassure me if I get frightened about bus theft:

‘Is bus robbery common?’!! It’s good that on top of reading my friends’ funny posts, I get to read AI’s unintentionally funny attempts to assert its relevance.

And if we didn’t have AI, we wouldn’t be able to create awesome, educational, valuable stuff like this:

If you asked me, ‘Who are the Irish?’ the simplest and most straightforward answer would indeed be: ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages, Brian Boru, Bring Boru, Saint Patrick, Newfoundland, Buenos Aires, Newfoundland.’ Well done, chatbot You’ve named two Irish people, one typo, one Welsh person, and some place names in the Americas.

Is ‘Bring Boru’ distinct from ‘Brian Boru?’ He would seem to be, because they have different stone busts. FYI, in case you thought these were real stone busts done by 11th-century Irish masons, no, no they are not, they were just made up by the chatbot.

This preoccupation with nationalities and haplogroups points to another feature that is emerging as the Internet descends into the Interslop. Like so much of the internet in general and AI slop in particular (for example, the creepy horned Aryan Icelandic family), there’s a just-about deniable racialist edge to it.

Being on the Interslop is a strange experience that’s hard to put into words. The closest I can manage is this: it’s like looking at the ads page of an old-time newspaper full of quack remedies and crackpot inventions, but with bizarre, apparently meaningless letters and numbers scrawled on the paper, as if in cipher, filling every margin. While you are reading, the village idiots of a dozen villages you will never visit are yelling in your ear. Meanwhile you are experiencing intervals of auditory and visual hallucinations. But you can screenshot and preserve these hallucinations and pore over them.

You might say it serves us right for putting 40-60% of all social interaction on platforms run for profit by the weirdest and most hubristic North Americans. But we didn’t really get to make a rational choice about it. There was no big vote in 2009-2010; everyone who was twenty just went on Facebook because that’s where everybody else was, and stayed there so they could keep up with their friends who moved to Australia. Youtube was good because it was where all the videos were. If social media had been basically a schizophrenia simulator at the beginning, I doubt it would have taken off. But now that the ascendancy of the big platforms has choked all the competition, they can show their true face, and get as messy and nakedly profit-driven as they want. I’m still going to share this on Facebook. What else am I going to do?

Of course, I know the real reason why the therapy ads were wailing in my ear about procrastination and hypersexuality. It’s not that anyone thought it would be a good idea. Nobody had to think it was a good idea. The people paying to run these ads are rewarded for quantity, not quality. And quantity is no longer an obstacle. In the time it took me to write this post, I could have pumped out many Gigabytes of eerie slop with minimal effort, and I would have got a hundred times more engagement. So why do I bother writing? Well. We were pretty innocent fifteen years ago. If we thought maybe privately-owned, profit-driven tech and social media monopolies might be a bad thing, we couldn’t yet put into words why. But we have no excuse now. Now we know what the online world starts looking like when you base everything on the pursuit of ‘engagement’ for its own sake.

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Meta: it’s ‘practically impossible’ to make AI tools unless you let us steal

Facebook and Instagram have put forward a rationale for the plagiarism they are doing in order to develop AI tools.

From theGuardian.co.uk: ‘According to Meta’s defence, there is “no economically feasible mechanism” for AI developers to obtain licensed copies of the “astonishingly large volume” of books needed to train AI.’

Well, if there’s no feasible way to do it, then just don’t steal the books. You can just not do it.

‘Meta “would have to initiate individualised negotiations with millions of authors”…’

That sounds very difficult. It also sounds like Meta’s problem, not ours. So again, how about, don’t do it?

It continues:

‘…a process which “would be onerous for even a few authors; it is practically impossible for hundreds of thousands or millions.”’

They are complaining that unless governments just give them permission to steal it all, it’s ‘practically impossible.’ Word of advice: if the thing you want to do is incompatible with paying authors for using their work for your profits, then it’s a bad thing and it should be practically impossible.

Genuine Concerns

Imagine the panic if refugees, or some minority community, had committed a crime wave like the one the far right have unleashed on Ireland over the past year or so.

Imagine if refugees had rioted, burned buses and trams, smashed shops; carried out dozens of arson attacks all over the country; burned homeless encampments and threatened homeless people with blunt weapons; protested outside politicians’ homes, hung them in effigy, issued death threats, harassed and beat up election candidates.

That alleged sex trafficker who’s on ice in Romania says that Ireland is being ‘invaded.’ McGregor says ‘we are at war.’ But these asylum seekers are children, men and women of all ages, and none of them have weapons or transport. They all speak different languages from one another, have different religions, don’t have any common political cause, and are scattered all over the country. They can just about afford nappies, but they can’t afford tanks. They came here to get away from war. Is that an invasion? Maybe ask someone who’s actually experienced an invasion, like – just for example – a refugee.

We keep hearing that, in contrast to the bad protesters who burn things and the alleged MMA sex offenders who want to see blood on our streets, there are decent and good protesters who have ‘genuine concerns.’

I’m a tolerant kind of person, but I’m losing patience with all this. What are these ‘genuine concerns’? Are they really more serious and genuine than the fear many felt when there was a pall of smoke hanging over Dublin?

I suppose some people are concerned because some of the refugees, while running for their lives, did not wait 6-8 weeks to apply for a passport off the government which was trying to kill them. That’s true, as far as it goes.

When you read in the papers about some shit show where protesters have barricaded a road or shouted at terrified children, and there’s an interview with the chairperson of some local group with a name like Concerned Citizens Who Are Definitely Not Racist, mostly they use their airtime just complaining that the government isn’t giving them information. There are endless variations on this theme. But I don’t want to be a referee for their emails with Roderic O’Gorman. Nobody does. Find more interesting things to complain about, or go home.

Sometimes the Concern is Genuine, but the object of that concern is complete bullshit. Yes, asylum seekers are vetted. No, they commit fewer crimes than the rest of us (and it doesn’t follow that me and you should be deported).

The vague passive anti-refugee sentiment is like, ‘The government is putting a roof over their head but not over mine.’ It’s been two decades of hardship with austerity overlapping with the housing crisis, then Covid and the price gouging campaign by grocery chains and energy companies. You can see where some of the rage is coming from.

But there would be no housing shortage at all if we had public housing, rent controls and an eviction ban instead of this feeding frenzy for landlords and investment funds. We could put a roof over everyone’s head, if we were willing to tell housing profiteers to get a real job. Raise that with the leaders of the far right, some of whom are deep in this racket themselves, and you’ll find out pretty quick how little they care about homeless people. From what I can see, most of the far-right leaders and influencers are small business and property owners, not people on the front lines of economic hardship.

I’m aware that it costs money to accommodate refugees. Taxpayers’ money, no less. To put it into perspective, it has trebled over the last year to a figure just south of what we spend on Housing Assistance Payments (ie, on the state subsidizing crazy rents by shovelling money into the bank accounts of landlords). Two things. First, people only complain about the ‘cost to the taxpayer’ of things they were already angry about anyway. Second, like HAP, nearly all of that money goes to people who own large or multiple buildings. The government looks after the big property owners, whatever happens. According to today’s Independent, only 1% of asylum seekers are in state-owned facilities where people can be housed for a fraction of the cost.

These numbers tell us that if we didn’t have any refugees, we could be giving twice as much HAP to landlords, and they could be jacking up the rent even higher to keep up. What a tragic missed opportunity.

A picture taken during the November 2023 riots in Dublin. From Wikimedia Commons, credit to CanalEnthusiast.

Meanwhile I have ‘genuine concerns’ of my own. I’m concerned about racist thugs setting shit on fire and beating people up. I’m concerned about garbage from social media five years ago suddenly appearing on election posters. Peter Casey has that poster where he looks like Father Jack – the slogan is STOP THE MADNESS. I agree, only I think he’s THE MADNESS.

I have genuine concerns about racism. 85,000 Ukrainian refugees were accepted pretty much overnight and without a murmur of protest, and on much better conditions than other nationalities. But the fury over 30,000 international protection applicants has turned Irish politics upside down. I don’t grudge the Ukrainians anything, and I don’t want assholes to protest them – but the shortage of beds is obviously due to the bigger group, not the smaller group. Has this really not occurred to anyone?

I have genuine concerns about the media. Dread washes over me when I walk into a shop, because when I glance at the newspapers I see headlines dripping with hostility.

I have legitimate concerns about the way Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and increasingly Sinn Féin are giving ground. On December 4th the state just told male asylum seekers, ‘Nope, we’re not housing you anymore;’ now Harris is clearing out those Grapes of Wrath tent camps and milking it for the cameras. Sorry Peter Casey, I think it’s MADNESS to be up in arms about the state being supposedly a soft touch – when it’s done less than the bare minimum to respect the right to asylum.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both report that the main issue on the doors is migration. Sinn Féin report housing is still the main issue, which tracks with recent polling. But regarding housing, says one prominent blueshirt, ‘the conversation on this issue is less heated than it was five years ago.’ Palpable relief! The far right present themselves as anti-establishment warriors, but they have taken the heat off the government for the housing catastrophe. Maybe that Fine Gaeler is talking it up, but the more migration goes up the agenda, the more housing slips down.

Anyway, what’s the far right’s solution on housing? The IFP say ‘House the Irish first.’ So a 1950s Northern Ireland-style segregated housing system, where people arbitrarily deemed ‘not Irish’ go to the back of the queue, regardless of need or how long they’ve been waiting. I suggest a snappier slogan: ‘Apartheid for Ireland.’

The world is getting more violent and the climate is getting more unstable. More people are going to be forced to leave their homes. A lot more. We can make these refugees into (very unconvincing) scapegoats for housing shortages and violence and whatever else. Or we can be serious about it.

Barring massive political change, I don’t believe any authorities from the EU down to our own government are going to be serious or compassionate. But we as individuals can still behave like human beings. If refugees come to your area, Syrian, Ethiopian, Ukrainian, whatever, don’t protest them (no, not even if you feel the government or IPAS messed something up). Do like they did in Borrisokane: go and talk to them. Some have fluent English, and the Translate apps have gotten good. Take those vague phrases like ‘military age males’ and tag them in your own mind with faces and names. You’ll find that they are regular people with entirely mundane needs and desires. But they are in a bad situation and they have come from a terrible one. They haven’t burned any trams (if one of them does, don’t worry, you’ll hear all about it) but they are the ones – far more than the protesters and more than me – who have genuine concerns.

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