HISTORY RHYMING

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years,

was always really only about oil.

Iraq had its Arab allies, the US,

and the USSR supplying cash,

know-how, arms. The war was a reprise

of the Western Front, with trenches and

chemical weapons. Machine guns scythed

line after line after line of young men.

A city was wrecked, a refinery,

many more than a million wounded and dead,

but no reparations were sought or given,

nor any territory exchanged –

a defensive war that accidentally

bigged-up a Cleric, and the hegemony

of zealotry and blood; an aggressive war

meant to big-up the hegemony

of the American Empire, but,

instead, made a Tyrant think he was

an ally not a useful idiot

with a regime of blood and torture.

The following two so-called Gulf Wars

were also about oil – as well, of course,

as caprice, rhetoric, spite and racism –

as is the current one. So, perhaps, at last,

Pax Americana will properly

be rendered as Clades Americana –

where ‘clades’, according to Google Translate,

may be translated as: ‘calamity’,

‘damage’, ‘defeat’, ‘discomfiture’, ‘disaster’,

‘loss’, ‘mutilation’, ‘overthrow’, ‘rout’, ‘ruin’,

‘scourge’, according to context, of course  – think

Afghanistan, Vietnam.