Hoo boy. You take a week off for Christmas and the next thing you know everything has gone insane.

BOMB BOMB BOMB, BOMB BOMB IRAN (2020 REMIX)

So Donald Trump kicked off the New Year by bombing the Baghdad international airport on Friday in what was a successful attempt to kill Iranian major-general Qassem Soleimani. Now, this has been making all sorts of news over the past few days and a lot of media outlets have already jumped past the basic details of the story in order to cut to the ramifications, but let’s just go back and review the basic details because they’re kind of important.

The United States bombed an airport - not a military installation, mind you, but a civilian airport - of a nation which was until recently technically their military ally in order to kill Soleimani, who was within the country legally. They did this without permission of the Iraqi government. The attack killed at least three other Iranian officers in addition to Soleimani and at least two civilians (and possibly more in both cases). If literally any other nation on the planet had done what the USA has just done, it would be considered lawless at best and a war crime at worst.

Usually at this point in the discussion the issue of whether Soleimani was “a bad guy” is raised, as if the idea that a high-ranking general in any country has blood on their hands is particularly novel considering that’s basically the point of the job. Yes, it is certainly accurate to say that Soleimani was almost certainly deeply involved in Iranian operations involving militias and terror groups; the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps handles most of that and the Quds Division (which Soleimani commanded) handles most of that most. A lot of Muslim writers operating out of the Middle East were trying to make this point at the time: whatever you think of the attack, Soleimani is responsible for a lot of deaths.

But anybody trying to justify this action with “he’s a bad guy” is trying to turn it into a moral question rather than a strategic one, and the moral question automatically fails because Soleimani, while doing awful things, really wasn’t doing anything that isn’t outside the boundaries of, say, American foreign policy. (Or most first world governments’ foreign policy, for that matter; America just has more opportunities to do bad things.) It feels sort of trite to point out that Henry Kissinger or Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for more civilian deaths than Soleimani by an order of magnitude, but it is nonetheless true. So you can’t just say “well he’s a baddie” to justify the killing. There has to be a good reason to break foreign policy norms in this way.

Speaking of which: the entire point of the foreign policy norms the US just broke with this attack is exactly the same reason the Geneva Conventions exist: it is a good idea to have rules of warfare and engagement that everybody agrees with, because that means they protect everybody, including you. (Presumably the USA does not want some other government deciding that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal and deciding to execute him.) And what that means is: in order for this to have been worth doing, there has to have been some absolutely vital reason to kill him immediately.

This is why Republican political operatives have been frantically claiming that killing Soleimani was necessary to stop some unspecified radical terror plot, the details of which are of course too classified to explain. Journalists have of course checked with their sources who have confirmed “yeah, there wasn’t anything like that.” Which isn’t really that surprising, because the idea of a terror plot that was ready to go right away and which would kill hundreds of Americans but which also required Qassem Soleimani to be alive to give the order, like the rest of Quds Division would just say “well, the general’s dead, I guess we can’t do the terror attack now because he is not alive to give the order” is breathtakingly dumb.

Needless to say, the result has been a foreign policy disaster for the USA - which didn’t warn any of its traditional key allies it was going to do this (although it did of course consult with Russia and China, because priorities). Tensions with Iran were already high and things have gotten worse because the national sentiment there seems to have been to galvanize the citizenry, and Iran has stated it has no further intention to abide by the 2015 nuclear deal (which Trump more or less punted his first year in office). The Iraqi Parliament has voted to expel all foreign troops from Iraq. Donald Trump, for his part, is of course threatening actual war crimes on Iran, promising to attack civilians and destroy “cultural landmarks,” and is also threatening Iraq with sanctions for refusing to let American troops remain in Iraq.

There are not a lot of good ways out of this, and the real problem is that the people in charge in the USA mostly do not want a good way out of this.

AND NOW FOR A DIFFERENT FLAVOUR OF APOCALYPSE

The Australian fires are really bad. At this point it seems sort of redundant to say that, because the news for the past two months has been “the Australian fires are really bad,” but they have been getting steadily worse over time as Australia gets deeper and deeper into summer. Perhaps at this point you have seen one of the various satellite images that have been making their way around the internet (the latest one, a 3D visualization made from NASA satellite data, is particularly horrible to see just to get an idea of how much of the continent is on fire), or one of the geographic analogies like “the size of the Australian fires is bigger than most of Alberta.” Perhaps you have heard some of the awful statistics, like how over half a billion animals are dead in the fires already, or how 30% of Australia’s koala population has been destroyed, or how the air quality in Sydney is actively corrosive to human lungs, or how there’s so much smoke that New Zealand - just under two thousand klicks away - is having air quality problems. Maybe you just saw some of the countless photos of Aussie skies being dark red at noon with near-zero visibility.

All of that is bad and you don’t need me to tell you it’s bad, and if you’ve been living under a rock I just gave you the short short version so we’re done. But what’s been really horrific has been the Australian government’s response. Scott Morrison, the prime minister, is a flat-out climate change denier, always has been, and has been aggressively promoting Australian coal exports during his entire run as leader (even as the world market for coal slowly and steadily shrinks). He was on holidays in Hawaii when the crisis really started to escalate (after refusing to meet with former emergency leaders and fire chiefs about the fires) and was slow to come back, for which he has been rightly pilloried, but that’s just a leader being shitty when you get down to it and shitty leaders come and go.

What’s been truly horrible is that the Liberal Party (remember, in Australia, the Liberals are the conservatives, because they are a country that is right flipped turned upside down) has adopted what is pure conspiracy theory from the dark hive part of the internet, which claims that the bushfires were all in fact started by arsonists and/or Green Party members who wanted to “dramatize” the climate crisis. This is obviously, blatantly stupid, but it is evident of the absolute last ditch attempt of climate change deniers to refuse to talk about the problem. The bushfires weren’t started by arsonists; they’re just the natural change of regular old bushfires into disasters when summer is over 40 degrees for weeks at a time and drier than ever, because the climate is, you know, changing and not for the better.

PLANE: THE DRAMA

Boeing fired its CEO just before Christmas (don’t worry, he’ll still walk away with millions of dollars because the CEO class takes care of its own) after halting production of the 737 MAX airliner a few days earlier in response to the problem of “everybody started refusing to buy them because they crashed.”

This is actually super important, because the modern world needs commercial aircraft to function, and because, as I have written before, there are really only two companies which make most of the commercial aircraft across the world: Boeing and Airbus. (Bombardier and Embraer are gradually being swallowed up by Airbus and Boeing, respectively, and neither makes the really big planes.) If Boeing can’t make new jets, Airbus will do it, and Boeing doesn’t have another light jet design (we’re talking about twin-engine, single-aisle jets here) to replace the 737 MAX - at the same time as Airbus has introduced its sexy new A321XLR and started racking up orders, because it turns out “our plane won’t crash” is a great sales pitch. The 737 MAX was supposed to be Boeing’s light jet design for the next ten to twenty years, and since light jets are both companies’ bread and butter (they make about ten times as many light jets as medium or heavy jets) this is a Real Problem For Boeing.

Which is bad, because airplane manufacturing is one of the few major manufacturing industries left that hasn’t left the USA. There were layoffs almost immediately as a result and there’s almost certainly going to be more because they keep finding problems with the 737 MAX - at first they thought the problems were just software issues, but now they’ve started finding hardware problems as well and increasingly it just looks like a bad design which innovated in clumsy ways, and there’s no real easy way out of that.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched since last newsletter (deep breath, I always binge movies a fair bit over the Christmas break):

Long Shot (2019, Jonathan Levine, theatre) - 3.5/5

A Christmas Carol (2019, Nick Murphy, TV) - 2/5

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (2019, Marielle Heller, theatre) - 3.5/5

Little Women (2019, Greta Gerwig, theatre) - 5/5

Her Smell (2019, Alex Ross Perry, Kanopy) - 4/5

Atlantics (2019, Mati Diop, Netflix) - 4.5/5

1917 (2019, Sam Mendes, theatre) - 5/5

Uncut Gems (2019, Josh and Benny Safdie, theatre) - 4/5

Eurotrip (2004, Jeff Schaefer, Amazon Prime) - 2.5/5

When we haven’t been watching movies, we’ve been catching up on The Expanse. Which is pretty great! We’re nearly finished season three and burning through it really fast, because it’s so great!

See you in seven.