Morrigan Johnson is an independent journalist based in Calgary.On February 28, a major military conflict erupted in the Middle East. The primary actors in this war are the United States (US) and Israel on one side, and the Islamic Republic of Iran (along with its regional proxies) on the other. This black swan event will have catastrophic cascading effects that Western powers do not seem to understand, especially because mass migration and the rise of caliphates in the West raise serious questions around the national interests, political process, and security. Even if a change of regime were possible, it would be hard to imagine it would result in a very pleasant liberal democratic progressive utopia when every other regime change has delivered an ISIS, Alqaeda, or Muslim Brotherhood-controlled hellscape.With the Strait of Hormuz being blockaded and regional airspace across multiple countries being closed, the crash of oil prices will spark one of the largest international economic crises we’ve seen in decades. OPEC's response can be expected shortly. What’s not hard to miss, however, is that mass migration has made many Western countries unrecognizable. When huge sections of Western voters are screaming death to America, or death to whichever enemy of America, the streets tend to fill with foreign flags, irrespective of the actual national interest, or the real security crisis that ensues from hyper sectarian ethnic conflicts. Judging by how easily countries are drawn into misadventure on behalf of foreign powers, the world once again stands on the brink. This time, however, the West is modified by factors that seem quite difficult to resolve, like woke identity politics and the millions of new refugees who will flee here in search of a new home.In late January, Iran experienced massive, nationwide anti-government protests driven by economic collapse. Official Iranian sources allegedly claimed 2,427 people died in the riots. The Iranian government responded with a severe crackdown and widespread internet blackouts. The US began a massive military buildup in the Middle East, deploying two carrier strike groups. Concurrently, US President Donald Trump publicly urged Iranians to overthrow their government, while Iran marked the anniversary of the 1979 revolution with strong anti-American rhetoric. Indirect nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran took place in Oman and Geneva but failed to de-escalate tensions.On February 24, President Trump used his State of the Union address to accuse Iran of reviving its nuclear weapons program. However, lacking evidence for the claim, nations seeking nuclear energy may be aiming to meet their energy needs in their right to economic development, raising questions about the precedent for other developing countries. On February 25, the Pentagon announced that US Vice Admiral Fred Kacher has been removed from his position as Director of the Joint Staff (DJS). While no publicly stated reason was given for the dismissal, the timing cannot be ignored. He would have overseen inter-theatre operational planning of US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for global posture adjustments, and refining the actual realistic strike options if requested by the executive. His dismissal occurred while the battle group, including two aircraft carriers, were enroute to carry out the preemptive strikes happening now..During his first term, President Trump officially withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the 2015 landmark nuclear deal negotiated under the Obama administration. Conversely, Israel is subject to fewer international standards, having signed on to fewer conventions, with the only standard being the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran’s nuclear energy program was subject to having signed on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the IAEA on top of the Obama-era nuclear deal (JCPOA), as it was one of the most internationally monitored energy programs in the world. Trump argued the deal was fundamentally flawed and reinstated heavy economic sanctions against Iran in a campaign of "maximum pressure." Tensions escalated significantly until the US military assassinated General Soleimani in a targeted drone strike near the Baghdad airport in Iraq, permanently demonstrating to regional powers that the US and Israel are diplomacy non-compliant actors whose goals are not what is stated. The nuclear deal fell through because the assassination targeted one of the key negotiators of the deal. Now, with war breaking out, Iran is calling for an emergency meeting of the IAEA to establish a basis on which to refute the claims that its energy program has been weaponized.An arrest warrant for Trump was rejected by Interpol in 2020, the world's largest international police organization, functioning as a cooperative network for law enforcement agencies across 196 member countries. Interpol formally rejected the request because it violated the organization's core foundational rules. Specifically, Article 3 of Interpol's constitution strictly forbids the organization from undertaking "any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character,” in this case, war and peace.While Interpol avoided the political fallout of the assassination, experts within the United Nations (UN) strongly condemned the strike. Agnes Callamard, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, released a formal report concluding that the US drone strike that killed Soleimani was "unlawful" and an "arbitrary killing.”The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against another state's territory. Because the US conducted the drone strike, assassinating the Iranian official on Iraqi soil without the permission of the Iraqi government, legal experts argue it was a violation of Iraq's sovereignty. In particular, Territorial Sovereignty (UN Charter Article 2(4)) has historically..The US officially justified the assassination to the UN as an act of self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. However, to legally strike first in self-defence, a country must prove it is facing an imminent armed attack which was unsubstantiated. The UN report concluded that the US failed to provide sufficient evidence that Soleimani posed an actual imminent threat to any life. Callamard noted this was the first known incident in modern history where a state invoked self-defence to justify attacking a state actor inside a third country. The "Imminence" Rule for Self-Defence (UN Charter Article 51).The black swan event we’re seeing break out today is crossing the line from peacetime Gulf tension into an open dirty war. The international laws being debated are shifting heavily toward International Humanitarian Law (the Laws of War) and the UN Charter. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter strictly prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Under international law, forcing regime change is not a recognized or legal justification for initiating a war. Today, Mai Sato, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, issued a statement characterizing the US and Israeli military strikes as a "violation of the UN Charter" and an "illegal military intervention.”Now, reports that the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed are circulating. The legality of a "decapitation strike" against a Head of State, compared to the targeting of a military general, hinges on the intersection of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, their 1977 Additional Protocol I (AP I), and the 1907 Hague Regulations. The assassination, which sabotaged the Iran nuclear deal, does not meet the threshold of Jus in Bello ‘principle of distinction,’ for example, if the Head of State is also the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, for example, a general, then they lose their Geneva immunity despite the killing of Soleimani being found illegal under a different framework. UN chief António Guterres said today, "The use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliation by Iran across the region, undermine international peace and security... The alternative is a potential wider conflict with grave consequences for civilians and regional stability,” calling for a return to negotiations to pull the region and the world back from the brink. In the final minutes, the floor of the emergency United Nations Security Council meeting was opened for "Right of Reply" statements, leading to a direct confrontation between the representatives of belligerents.Rather than leveraging non-aligned pressure, Canada, as a middle power, is increasingly seen as an unstable country as the international trends have polarized and displaced its own interests. There are many millions of new people in the country with not much explanation of the expectations, and they’re already hyperpolarized on any number of international circumstances. Toronto police estimated that 350,000 demonstrators took over the streets on February 14. These mass protests fly all sorts of foreign flags. Calgary police Staff Sgt Rod MacNeil has said, “the steady increase in protests — 300 percent over four years in Calgary’s case — has been the norm across Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic.”.The hyper sectarian trend is not only one-sided to the woke left in the West, as Iran has proven, but there is a mass woke right and pandering to ethnic voting blocks happens on all sides now. The Americans have warned their allies about walking away on national security over civilizational erasure. The problems worsen when you consider that political parties and liberal democratic institutions are forming caliphate, cabal, or cartel hyper sectarian expressions, throwing them into paralysis. As experts such as David Betz, a professor of military and strategic studies at King’s College London, have warned, as cities are ghettoized into “feral cities,” civil war is very likely coming to the West.With increased talk of foreign interference, Canada’s establishment is grossly unprepared for hyper-sectarian diaspora politics. While some are saying that diaspora politics are here to stay and we need to “get used to it”, analysts from the UK have consistently warned that democracy will not function normally. Lord Jonathan Sumption, former Justice of the UK Supreme Court, has said “...the moment that political opinion becomes ghettoized in particular minorities is a dangerous moment. It's happened recently primarily because of the electric effect that the events in Gaza have had on people in most Western countries." While the culture wars are becoming exhausting in Britain, the political expression has changed as things turn to puzzling inversions of interests..A recent byelection in the UK for Gorton and Denton raised the civil war danger when the hyper sectarian Muslim vote won by a major landslide, spelling danger for Kier Starmer’s moderate Wokeistan. The Green Party ran on a fanatically sectarian pro-Palestine message to “Stop Reform,” slandering them as “far right fascists” for being against mass immigration. This far-left landslide is driven by extreme ethnographic pandering. The campaign targeted non-English ghettos with materials communicating in Urdu-language, the most common language in Pakistan. Prioritizing non-English diaspora over the native population or its interests, the British are playing with fire. As Madeline Grant recently alluded in The Spectator, you can now stand like a waxwork of the acid bath murderer, shout “death to [whichever nation]” and win with woke semantic slop. Compared to the anti-regime Iranian and pro-Israeli protests we see in hijacking conservative talking points, the two sides want to kill each other. Outside of our borders, they actually are often killing each other while we speak..If the old system of declining liberal democracy was defined by cartel politics, in which issues or wars could be bought, then we’ve entered an entirely different historical period in the West where left and right are being defeated by biopolitics. The problem of turning swaths of the globe into a war-ridden hellscape is that it creates refugees and mass migration. It creates a mass population in our streets shouting death to this or that country or each other, undermining security, and permanently importing ethnic conflicts. In military and strategic studies of asymmetric warfare, it is known as “weaponized population.” No serious country would take it lightly, because you cannot work with it. Irrespective of whichever identitarian we’re talking about, sides of incompatible ethnic conflicts cannot live and work together and cannot function under the same nation-state federalism and political process systems.Yet, in the West, with wars breaking out around the world, forced mass migration, we’re seeing the self-perpetuating contradiction of caliphate, cabal, and conclave political parties and subverted liberal democratic institutions vying for ethnography, settling their ethnic scores.Morrigan Johnson is an independent journalist based in Calgary.
