War

Strait to hell, boys (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 20, March 19th 2026)

Since this war started I’ve been paying attention to news reports with a few key questions in my mind. ‘Will the Iranian people rise up in support of the people bombing them?’ was never one of those questions. The first hours of the conflict, when the Iranians fired back forcefully, settled in my mind the question, ‘Will the Iranian government fold?’ They didn’t, and now they won’t. But I’ve been wondering: will Iran reach a point where it can’t launch missiles and drones to significant military effect anymore? The Iranian government would not surrender at that point, so what then? Will the US reach a point where they are not making progress anymore with the bombing, where the costs threaten to pass a tipping point? Would Trump call it off? Or what other means would the US pursue, probably alongside continued bombing? Some of these questions are being answered as we speak as the war transitions to a new phase.

Previous posts in this series: What advantages does Iran have in this war? (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 4, March 3, 2026) and The Machine War (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 12 – March 11th 2026)

Battle of Hormuz?

An image of the Strait of Hormuz from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of NASA. Iranian countryside in the foreground, Arabia across the strait.

As far as this war goes, the Strait of Hormuz is now the primary focus of the world’s attention. I see potential for a pitched battle to develop in the straits of Hormuz. In other words the US may try to force the straits using naval and air power. To what end?  Not only for economic reasons, but for reasons of prestige, power projection etc. Such a battle would be difficult for Iran as they don’t have air superiority. But US vessels would be vulnerable to attacks from the shore and from drones, including naval drones. Could the US force a way through? Most likely yes, but at serious cost. Could it guarantee the safety of civilian shipping for even, say, one week following the end of such a battle? Let alone for years to come? They would have to control the entire shoreline at all times, requiring a massive commitment of resources and personnel. Actually making the strait safe means occupying a decent chunk of Iran. Occupying part of Iran means fighting a ground war.

I wrote the above days ago. Today I read this:

The US operations being contemplated include securing safe passage for oil tankers through the ⁠Strait of Hormuz, a mission that would be accomplished primarily through air and naval forces, the sources said.

But securing the strait could also mean deploying US troops to Iran’s shoreline, said four sources, including two US officials. Reuters granted the sources anonymity to speak about military planning.

Jesus Christ.

A ‘Battle of Hormuz’ scenario would draw the US into a painful trap. In a battle like that, Iran could bring its strength to bear much more so than in the current air war, because it would be a question of military power in coastal waters and on the ground. The war would move from air, the favoured element of the US, to water and then to earth. Specifically Iranian soil, where the Iranians would have a massive advantage in terms of numbers, personnel, local support and knowledge. The US would not be able to defeat an Iranian insurgency, and I have my doubts about them even winning a conventional war in this situation.

If the US does not attempt to force the Strait of Hormuz, and just watches as more and more countries cut deals with Iran to get their shipping through, they will be accepting a defeat on the global stage. They may well sit back and try to wait Iran out. I’m not alone in half-expcting this; on March 13th we had Elliot Abrams, former high-ranking diplomat, weighing in with the opinion that Trump will ‘call off’ the war in ‘probably a week or two.’ That does not strike me as implausible. Or, in the circumstances, unwise.

Attempting to force the straits would be a wild thing to do. But launching this war was a wild thing to do. US leaders, given their volatile public profiles, could well go for crazy plans as a way to salvage wounded pride, but only end up committing more and ultimately losing more. They have already blustered their way into a strategic dilemma.

The other depressing fact to remember, though, is that US military power is so huge that these volatile leaders could make every imaginable blunder and still be cushioned from defeat. One fifth of the world’s oil might just have to move through a warzone for a few decades while Iran is torn apart and its people suffer. Stupider things have happened.

I’m throwing in a second Strait of Hormuz image simply because you can make out Dubai’s Jumeirah palm in this image. Image from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of NASA.

Missiles and drones

Another key feature of the last few weeks has been that Iranian projectile and drone launches have fallen to a low but consistent plateau.

I want to draw attention to this article by Muhanad Seloom which makes an argument that the US and Israel are winning the present war. He points out how badly the US/Israeli air campaign has damaged Iran’s capacity:

‘Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.’

The weak spot in his argument comes at the end. We can all agree that the bombing campaign has been vast in scale, hitting many thousands of targets in Iran and seriously damaging its military production. But then Seloom asks, ‘What prevents Iran from restarting production? The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in practise.’ I simply don’t see what post-conflict framework, short of military occupation, would prevent the Iranian state from rearming.

The article also acknowledges that communication from the Trump regime has been ‘poor’, a reference to the mishmash of strategic aims that have been declared to the world. I don’t think it’s just communication. The real problem lies in what is being communicated. There was no strategy beyond the assumption that the Iranian government would immediately collapse or surrender. Maybe the Trump administration will move the goalposts and declare victory. But as I’ve said before, the Iranian government is in a position where it can say when the war ends.

The other point is that Iran, even with a diminished capacity, is still launching enough missiles and drones. Just today they hit a power plant in Haifa. The censorship regime prevents us from seeing much. We have to extrapolate from the limited data we can see. The New York Times found 17 damaged US facilities in the region using satellite data. Daily news reports bring us news of mounting horrors in Lebanon and further bombings across Iran, but there are also still regular reports of Iranian missiles striking targets in Israel and across the Gulf.

The US leadership with their sadistic and bombastic speeches are signposting their own untrustworthiness. So I don’t believe their boasts about how much of Iran’s military capabilities they have destroyed. And it seems plausible to me that their air campaign passed a point of diminishing returns a week or two ago. There is a part of the Iranian military capacity which the US cannot hit. Iran is big; there are sites the bombers cannot find or reach. In spite of boasts that they have destroyed all air defences in the country, I would bet there are heavily-defended areas that the Americans are shying away from. Meanwhile a part of what has been destroyed can be restored.

I assumed for a while that Iranian missiles and drones would run out. What’s actually happened is that a massive supply is stuck in a bottleneck of launching capacity. Their machine war has plateaued to a level that is low relative to February 28th. But it’s still going and it’s not going to stop for a long time.

Proxies/Allies

We should consider a scenario where the US, while continuing to bomb Iran, also arms and funds various opposition forces within Iran.

In the first week of the war the question of Kurdish and Baloch insurgents was more to the fore than it is now. With various Iranian Kurdish parties declaring an alliance and with autonomous Kurdish regions now in existence in Iraq and Syria, it’s likely that, at the very least, some Kurdish forces in the northwest of Iran will make some moves. The Balochs in southeast Iran are another national group who might be willing to join the fight. Showing the Iranian leaders’ alarm at such a prospect, they carried out drone strikes in the early days of the war against Kurdish-held outposts.

On March 5th interesting remarks from a Baloch leader were quoted in The Guardian: “I think [everyone] who is against the brutal cleric regime would accept support from the US but it should be a consistent support that resolves the issues of minorities – unlike, for example, when the US gave support for Syrian Kurds and then betrayed Kurds.”

The US lacks moral authority and trust due to its (bipartisan) fickle treatment of proxies in the past. Of course, a tenet of Trumpism seems to be that a great empire doesn’t need trust or moral authority. As a result, these groups within Iran are reluctant to fight in spite of their aspiration for independence. Hard to blame them! Joining the US and Israel wholeheartedly would be very unwise, given Trump could hang them out to dry “probably in a week or two.” There is reluctance on the US side too, because Erdogan does not like the sight of Kurdish people with guns. The same goes for Balochs and Pakistan.

Also, to what end? The purpose of promoting insurgencies would be to distract Iranian ground forces. But unless the US actually tries to occupy the Iranian coast, there is nothing to distract them from. It’s a waste.

The developments toward a regional war, especially in Lebanon where the civilian death toll is now approaching that of Iran, and the continuing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza, deserve more attention than I have been able to give them in this post. So there we have it for Day 20 of the war, as I see it: potential for a pitched battle around the straits, Iranian barrages continuing at the same rate while the far greater US/Israeli bombardment sees diminishing returns, and mixed signals re the development of insurgent movements on the borders of Iran.

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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.

Appendix: A note on the death toll

In the short post that follows I will be discussing large numbers of fatalities, and I want to ask readers to keep in mind that these are not ammunition for social media debates but real people who died horrible, untimely deaths.

How many were killed in Red and White Terror? Any estimate you read in any book will be flatly contradicted by the next book you pick up. I have seen claims that the total number killed by both sides was in the millions, but I don’t credit this. It could be argued back and forth whether either side had motive or opportunity for deliberate killing on such a scale. (For the record, I think the Reds had opportunity but not motive, and the Whites had motive but not opportunity.)

But neither side had the murder weapon. The only weapons capable of inflicting death on such a horrific scale are strong and efficient state institutions. Neither side had the institutional capacity for such killing, any more than they had the capacity for major humanitarian operations to tackle hunger and epidemics.

I’ve read a good few primary and secondary sources, and a death toll in the millions just doesn’t seem likely to me. I’ll try to explain why below.

We read that 2,500 Red prisoners were killed after the Whites took Omsk. It is rare that we get such a high death toll from one incident. Did ten massacres with a similar or higher death toll occur during the Civil War? Yes – unfortunately I could think of ten on the spot, split between various factions. Did a hundred incidents with a death toll in the thousands occur? I’m pleased that I can say a flat no. If there were five or six or seven hundred incidents in which thousands were killed, then a death toll in the millions would be plausible. Since there were not, it is not.

This still allows for the possibility that there were hundreds of thousands of individual executions and smaller-scale massacres, but I think that possibility is remote. Life was cheap in this era. But if there were enough small-scale violence going on to add up to the millions, the memoirs and novels that came out of that time would have to have someone being shot or sabred on every page (to be fair, Asian Odyssey by Alioshin comes pretty close to that at times!).

The mass death is terrible enough without exaggeration. My educated guess is that the real number for Red and White combined is greater than 100,000 but less than 500,000. Add in terror campaigns waged by various nationalist forces and interventionists (such as the contribution of Ukrainian Rada forces to the pogroms of 1919, or the massacre of Armenians by Turkish-aligned forces in Baku in 1918) and the total might well be pushed some way north of half a million.

A death toll in the low hundreds of thousands would put the Russian Civil War in the same territory as the Spanish Civil War. Spain had a smaller population, but there terror was pursued in a more determined and systematic way by an efficient military. It seems that in relation to Spain it’s been possible to do some serious homework and settle on a good approximation of the numbers (see Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust). In relation to Russia’s Civil War, I have seen nothing but rough estimates. And, to be brutally honest, this is the case for mortality throughout the revolutionary period: partial data, ambiguity in how it can be interpreted, and politically-motivated spitballing about the total.

Appendix: The Russian Civil War in popular memory (Premium)

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Bono’s Terrible Poem: An Autopsy

On March 17th Bono wrote a poem about the Ukraine war. Without even proofreading it, he sent it to a top US politician, and she read it out at a public gathering. Then he decided to post it on Twitter,

‘It wasn’t written to be published, but since it’s out, here it is,’ he tweeted. No, he didn’t want it to be out. He just sent it to a luncheon involving top political elites in the most powerful country in the world.

The poem was so bad it was a shock to the senses. But now that a few weeks have passed we should take a closer look. What are the specific features that make it so bad?

It’s on the nose

Usually poems weave in symbols and imagery and metaphors. For example, a poem about a vicious invasion might use snake imagery to signify evil. It might weave the metaphor into various vivid images.

Instead of doing that, Bono simply tells us what his poem’s symbol is: ‘For the snake symbolises/ An evil that rises…’

From this we can surmise that if Bono had written ‘The Road Not Taken’ he would have begun, ‘A fork in the road symbolises a major life choice…’

But that’s not quite it. We need more comparisons to really do it justice. If Bono had written ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ he would have begun, ‘This Greek vase is a symbol of stuff not getting old.’

Or ‘This Greek vase is like a wife who you’ve married but haven’t had sex with yet.’

It’s a textbook case of Irish narcissism

How are we to read the line ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine’? It seems that he’s saying Ireland had sorrow and pain in the past, and now Ukraine is getting a taste. As if Ukraine was some kind of bucolic hobbit village during the twentieth century – as opposed to a land ravaged by two world wars, famine, terror, the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear disaster and looting by oligarchs.

In this poem, Bono responds to the horror in Ukraine by talking about Ireland. There are grounds for empathy in our shared history of national oppression. But can’t Irish people engage with global events with a bit of taste, without making it all about us?

It’s largely babble

Let’s repeat that phrase; ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now the Ukraine.’ Sometimes in long complex sentences, we mistakenly switch between the singular and the plural. But what excuse does Bono have here, in a phrase eight words long?

Even if he had written ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ ARE now the Ukraine,’ what would that phrase even mean? I struggle to put it into words. Our emotions have been transferred to another country? …have been transformed into another country?

An updated version of the poem reads ‘Ireland’s sorrow and pain/ Is now in Ukraine.’ Did we put our sorrow and pain on a container ship and send it over to the port of Odesa?

‘And they [saints] struggle for us to be free/ From the psycho in this human family.’ Us? But Bono is already free from Putin! Putin doesn’t control any territory in which Bono or his offshore money reside.

‘For the snake symbolises/ an evil that rises/ and hides in your heart/ as it breaks.’ What does this line mean? You, Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of US politicians, have got evil hiding in your heart. I’m not entirely sure that’s what Bono meant to say. And what’s this about hearts breaking?

All these musings are a waste of time, because later we are told that ‘the evil has risen my friends [sic, no comma] / From the darkness that lives in some men.’ All of a sudden, the evil is not something that rises in the hearts of Bono’s heartbroken friends in the US political elite. It is an outside force that threatens us. From context we can guess that it is Putin.

More examples of this incoherence are nailed down here.

It’s banal

When the poem is coherent, it is usually not saying anything worth saying.

What does itactually say about the war in Ukraine? Only that from time to time ‘sorrow and fear’ come along, because of evil. In this poem, evil is a category which includes (presumably amongst other things), paganism in Fifth Century Ireland and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But evil no longer hides in Nancy Pelosi’s broken heart. The source of the evil is now ‘the darkness that lives in some men.’

How unfortunate that darkness lives in the hearts of some men. If only it had taken up lodgings in some more convenient place. Then this war wouldn’t have happened.

It’s absurd

When the poem is coherent and not banal, it’s absurd.

It is entirely possible to write a poem paying tribute to the armed resistance of the Ukrainian people and to the resilience of civilians and aid workers under the bombs. But Bono does not go down that route; instead he singles out the politician who happens to be in charge of Ukraine at this time, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And not only does Bono praise this politician, and not only does Bono compare him to St Patrick. No, at the end of his poem Bono says that Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick.

Because this is the image that comes to mind whenever I hear the name ‘Volodymyr Zelenskyy.’

So St Patrick was personally brave. And yes, it appears Zelenskyy is also personally brave. But there the similarity ends, because (A) St Patrick was never an actor. And (B) he didn’t have a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group on his payroll.

But even if the comparison fit… So Putin is a snake and Zelenskyy is Saint Patrick. Zelenskyy is banishing Putin. But… why? Why say this?

It’s tasteless

In his tweet Bono explains that every year he sends a funny limerick to US politicians for their St Patrick’s Day luncheon. As you do.

This year, he explains, instead of sending a cheeky little rhyme, he felt compelled to send a serious and heavy limerick. Yes, a heavy limerick. Because this year things are different. There’s a war on. People are dying.

Not like all those other years, when there was no war on and nobody was dying. And if there were any wars happening, the US politicians who chuckled at Bono’s funny Irish limericks certainly had nothing to do with any of those wars.

But even leaving all that aside, maybe you shouldn’t write a limerick about a war. Maybe you shouldn’t try to discuss the nature of evil in a limerick. You see, the limerick genre has certain limits.

But as Bono admits, it’s an ‘irregular’ limerick. You can say that again. Limericks are disciplined, with a tight rhyming scheme and rhythm.

For example, ‘There once was a singer from Dublin/ Whose tax situation was troubling…’ etc.

Limericks have to scan well, or else they sound contrived. And they are short, like five lines.

It’s not a limerick

When I first read Bono’s poem, it scanned so poorly I didn’t even realise it was a limerick. There were words that I didn’t realise were supposed to rhyme with other words. I only learned that it was a limerick because Bono said so. Then I went back and read it in the sing-song jokey rhythm of a limerick. It sounded so much more tasteless and bizarre. In other words, it’s not an irregular limerick, it’s an atrocious limerick.

If Bono had written something like the following, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad:

A snakey old psycho named Putin

Escalated the bombing and shooting

But Zelensky had tactics

Because he is St Patrick

And so for Ukraine I am rooting.

It’s absurd, offensive, tasteless, baffling. But it’s brief, and it’s actually a limerick.

And it says everything Bono takes fifteen lines to say. That’s it. All the essential points are there. But to create the impression that he’s saying something deep and heartfelt, he ties the poem up in knots with vague phrases that mean nothing. He does not succeed in covering up his poem’s essential banality and absurdity, only in adding a layer of incoherence.