PETER HITCHENS: I noticed for myself the savage aftermath of the Iraq conflict. We are within the arms of silly kids… this can impoverish the world for years

We are in the hands of foolish children. They may look like adults, but President Trump and his court of flatterers think the planet is a toy and are playing with it. Look at the name he has given to his war, ‘Operation Epic Fury’. It sounds like an ultra-violent computer game, or a bad film, not a serious action in which many may die or be driven from their homes, and which – if it goes wrong – might also impoverish much of the world for years.

It comes as Mr Trump moves several steps closer to becoming a fully developed megalomaniac. Government buildings in Washington DC now bear huge banners displaying the President’s likeness. He recently attacked Supreme Court judges who ruled against him as ‘fools and lap dogs’, ‘very unpatriotic’ and ‘disloyal to the Constitution’.

He said baselessly that America’s highest court had been been swayed by foreign interests. I suspect this behaviour does not accord with his oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States’.

He wants to have his face on the coinage. His recent State of the Union speech went on for almost 108 often boastful minutes, during which he tried to order Congressmen to stand up. They didn’t.

But of course the highly disciplined US military stands up without being asked when he enters a room. It salutes him, as the lawful Commander-in-Chief, and it obeys him, as judges and Congressmen do not. So we have to wonder if this highly dangerous war, whose end is unknowable, is his way of making up for the fact that not everybody does what he tells them to do. I don’t know. It makes no sense to me.

Back in 2015, Iran agreed to severe limits on its nuclear research in return for relief from crippling Western sanctions. If Iran is ever to emerge from the corrupt, cruel and narrow-minded rule of the Ayatollahs, then it needs to develop a prosperous and flourishing civil society. In my direct experience, the mullahs thrive on the hostility of the West and like to make it worse. That helps them harness the patriotism of their people on their side, as they will now be trying to do.

I believe the 2015 agreement could have brought Iran back into the civilised world. It was closely monitored and, as far as I can tell, Iran was doing as it had promised. But in 2018, one President Donald Trump set out to wreck it. I do not know why he was so keen to do so, but he succeeded, and here we are.

There was a possible path to peace, and it was Mr Trump who chose to turn away from it. Since then, he has ordered and achieved the assassination of a senior Iranian general (imagine if it had been the other way round). Iran made only a token retaliation. And last year he ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Once again, Iran responded with a limited missile attack on a US base in Qatar.

Will this end so easily? Let us hope so, but can we be sure. Iran knows that the US can devastate it. But what will that achieve? Mr Trump, who gets on perfectly well with other murderous regimes in the Middle East, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia, claims to be especially outraged by the Revolutionary Guard’s mass murderer of protesters.

Yet he is urging the people of Iran to go out into the streets and take them on again. It was a strange moment. The President was filmed in semi-darkness flanked by flags, clad in a baseball cap bearing the letters US, which shaded the upper part of his face melodramatically. He gave Iranians this rather amazing advice, which basically tells them that now is their chance, and it is their own fault if they do not take it.

The words are astounding: ‘Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No President was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a President who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.’

I am afraid this brought to mind the actions of another US President, the late George Bush Senior who, on February 15, 1991 (having driven Saddam Hussein from Kuwait) urged ‘the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside’.

Bush’s message was transmitted into Iraq on radio and TV, while aircraft dropped leaflets calling on soldiers and civilians to ‘fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides’. A major revolt did in fact follow. It was savagely crushed. I have a special reason to recall this. In May 2003, on assignment in post-invasion Iraq, I visited a newly reopened mass grave at Munahil, near the ancient site of Babylon. This was where many of those who had followed President Bush’s advice had ended up.

I wrote: ‘Laid out among the wasteland were the remnants of what had once been hundreds of people: brown bones, hanks of hair, skulls still half-covered in earth and bits of cloth assembled into shockingly small plastic bags.

‘They had been Shias who followed Western calls to rise against Saddam in 1991, were abandoned by us, massacred by Saddam and cast, bound and blindfolded, into pits.’

At the time, one Anthony Blair publicly hoped that such ghastly scenes would make people support his invasion of Iraq. This was not the effect it had on me. I still remember it. I hope you will forgive me if I view today’s developments without much enthusiasm.