In these hours the American president Donald Trump he stated that the war against Iran would be “almost over”, while, thanks to this willing statement (opposed by Israel which instead wants war until the total annihilation of the historic Iranian enemy), the oil markets breathe a sigh of relief and the price of crude oil slowly falls (even if it does not drop at the petrol pump at the moment, the result of the usual shameful speculation). Precisely here lies the point that we cannot avoid: Can the outcome of a war be influenced by the price of oil? What about the innocent victims? And what about material damage, including to civil infrastructure? What about pollution from the bombing of oil wells, tankers and refineries throughout the Persian Gulf? Just “collateral damage”? We are horrified just thinking about it.
And while the American president has his hands laid on him by his evangelical friends, who bless him and his war – an excellent promotional move complete with a posed shot to try to regain the votes lost thanks to the Epstein files and wink at the “Wizard” world angry at yet another war unleashed by the most warmongering of self-candidates for the Nobel Prize – he changes his mind every day about the purpose of his war. Indeed, their war, because it is also Netanyahu’s, and indeed perhaps above all his.
The first criterion with which to evaluate a conflict is human lives. In Iran there are already hundreds of deaths, probably thousands, including many civilians and children. Even entire classes of students were killed in the bombings. Behind every number there is a face, a family, a future broken forever. For a Christian – and for every person with a conscience – this should be the first question: what justice and what peace can arise from a mountain of innocent victims? Every war brings resentment, hatred, loneliness.
Then there is the question of international lawwhich now seems to have been definitively put in the cellar. The use of force can never become an ordinary instrument of foreign policy. If each power decided to militarily strike another state, because it considers it a threat or because it fears economic consequences, the world would descend into a law of the jungle. And perhaps by now it has already fallen there thanks to the new warlords equipped with the most deadly effective weapons. Peace is not built by bombing and then declaring that the operation was an “excursion” out of town or that it will end soon.
Another question concerns political responsibility. In recent history we have seen several times that tearing down or destabilizing a country is much easier than rebuilding it. The cases are countless. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and lastly Venezuela teach us how illusory the idea of ”solving” a problem with bombing is. When the bombs fall silent, what remains are the victims, the institutional chaos, the militias, the radicalization, the drug cartels. And above all a people left with fewer prospects than before.
This is why the feeling of continually changing objectives is also worrying: first international security, then the fall of the regime, then the defense of the oil routes, now the need to calm the energy markets. A war, already unjustifiable in itself, thus becomes a spiral of force that feeds itself with false justifications.
The social doctrine of the Church, as it has developed in recent decades, says that there is no “just war” and it can never be taken into consideration as a tool for resolving international disputes. This is why today the real question is not whether the conflict will end soon or whether oil will return to acceptable prices. The question is another: who will take care of the wounds that remain? Who will restore a future to those girls, to those families, to those people, to those territories wounded to death? As long as this answer does not exist, and will never exist, talking about “the war is almost over” is just the painful attempt to move on too quickly after having made an omelette. And the conscience of the world and of us citizens of that world must not allow it.
