March 9, 2026: An angered son succeeding his slain father. Nobody needs to be a geopolitical expert to see what’s next.
A CNN analyst called the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s new supreme leader a “very bad sign”, and Donald Trump is reportedly “unhappy” with it.
Maybe “unhappy” is far too soft a word. Let’s put it this way: Even if they were equally old and equally built, Trump would not go into the same ring with Mojtaba Khamenei.
The US president had inexplicably said he wanted to have a say in creating the new Iranian leadership. But after repeatedly demonising Mojtaba Khamenei’s father and bombing his country multiple times, making some 160 schoolgirls die instantly in the process, the appointment of the new supreme leader is Iran saying “You must be having a laugh.”
We have seen, in the Philippines for example, what a political assassination can do to even ordinary family members, not someone who has reportedly had a behind-the-scenes political role. This is a son who lost their parents because of the United States and Israel and who knows for certain that the enemies will target him like his father if he does not stay away from the all-important succession.
Mojtaba’s wife and, reportedly, one of his children, were also killed on the first day of the joint US-Israeli war.
This is what Trump who, along with Israel, killed his father, who the president called “one of the most evil persons in history”, said: “He’s going to have to get approval from us.” Trump told ABC News on Sunday, hours after news of the son’s selection emerged that if Mojtaba didn’t get approval from him, “he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”
Time said the younger Khamenei enjoyed the same close support that his father had maintained with the Revolutionary Guards, which has issued a statement pledging "deep respect, total loyalty and absolute obedience" for the new supreme leader.
“The Guards aren’t just fighting for proxy groups or missiles, they are fighting for their very existence,” another analyst based in Tehran, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was quoted by Time as saying. The analyst said a lot more, but what should disturb Trump the most was the following (although it’s a fact that everyone knows):
“Mojtaba didn’t lose just a father on that day, he lost a mother, a wife and a child. He is filled with an undying desire for revenge, and the Guards know this.”
One photo that cancels out all war rhetoric
March 7-8, 2026: Aren’t wars supposed to be fought to prevent the kind of things in the above picture?
Just about a week in and every piece of rhetoric about wars has disintegrated before our eyes.
Forget about “Sometimes wars are for a greater good.” Forget about “We wage wars for women and children.” No greater good is there for the families of those in the coffins. And were women crying their hearts out and children unhappy at the Minab neighbourhood before some politicians half the world away decided to make lives in their country “great again”?
We all grow up being taught that wars are necessary evil, that sometimes you have to kill for a good cause. Truth is the Minab school bombing had been unnecessary until some remote political leaders sipping coffee in their command rooms said otherwise. And now that it has happened, a lot of excuses and explanations are being made to justify or have the world come to terms with the mass killings of schoolgirls. Some people are trying to make the facility’s location a bigger controversy than the explosion itself, which is a crying shame.
US midterm elections can be weirdest
March 6, 2026: One online joke is that no matter who US voters pick as their leader, they always end up with Benjamin Netanyahu.
That joke will get louder near the US midterm elections late this year, although voters will this time elect just MPs and senators, not the president.
It will be a very strange midterm. Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2024 on an “America first” platform, vowing to stay away from costly military conflicts overseas. His Republican Party will now compete with the opponents he used to chastise for delving into unnecessary armed conflicts who now are frowning upon the Iran war.
Talk about role reversal. Talk about voters' ambivalence.
Everyone will have to walk a tightrope. The Republicans will say the war is “necessary”, and the high costs are an unavoidable price to pay. The Democrats will avoid discussing Israeli influences over American politics, but will focus instead on how Trump wields powers and escapes congressional scrutiny in the process. Voters, knowing full well that both parties are not that different when it comes to Israel, will grit their teeth and vote to snub Trump in case they don’t like the US involvement in the war.
A Reuters poll conducted after the start of military operations suggests that only about a quarter of Americans approve of Trump’s decision to go to war. More interesting and worrisome for Trump is that only 55 percent of Republicans agreed with him. When George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, more than 90 per cent of Republican citizens supported it.
Low domestic support for the Iran war is not Trump's only worry. Some influential right-wing figures with online following of millions have openly criticised his administration's stand. Mainstream media outlets have also stated that anti-Israel sentiment in America is becoming more and more nonpartisan.
Said Al Jazeera: “Midterm elections have historically served as referendums on the sitting president and his party. All members of the House face voters every two years, and the president’s party almost always loses seats in midterm cycles, especially when a president’s approval rating is below 50 percent. Trump, whose approval rating has hovered between 36 percent and 38 percent, recently became the first president ever with a sub-50 percent approval rating in both his first term and during the first year of his second term.”
To sum the above up: It can be very bad for Trump late this year.
Don't make it US Crusades
March 5, 2026: Warriors in the past didn’t fight for oil, didn’t have hegemonic aspirations and didn’t care about geopolitics.
So, what’s happening in the Middle East and beyond right now is not about promised land anymore, no matter how some political leaders are trying to make many people think that way. And that’s why some reported remarks by American unit commanders are worrisome.
According to The Young Turks, a fairly-unorthodox and hard-hitting American media team with a YouTube subscribed following of almost 6.5 million, one US commander has told non-commissioned officers that the war with Iran was holy.
While we can give Israeli troops the benefit of the doubt, meaning some of them may be really fighting for religious things they have believed in for a long, long time, for American soldiers to be made to think that the war is part of God’s plan and Donald Trump “was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” is an absolute nonsense.
To begin with, Trump said himself that it was about (alleged) nuclear, although it somehow morphed into oppression and regime change later. Nothing he said was ever about bringing Jesus back.
Complaints about religious drives have been nowhere near overwhelming in America, but the idea that the current war is God’s divine plan has spread in dozens of military units and installations across the superpower country. It’s worrying enough to make TYT highlight the subject and the network’s clip on it has been watched by over 624,000 people in just one day.
How many years were the Crusaders preoccupied with Jerusalem? And it is just a small piece of land with no petroleum and strategic significance. A modern-day Crusade is very unlikely, but that doesn’t mean some people are not trying to make the current exchange of missiles look like one.
Minab school bombing changes complexion of everything
March 4, 2026: If attacks on Iran were meant to keep a global status quo, the opposite is happening real fast.
A major accelerator is the Minab girls' school massacre. While the shortage of oil and Iranian bombing of facilities on countries Tehran is not at war with have tainted the Iranian image, those of the United States and Israel are taking bigger hits.
Whereas the mainstream western media have largely played down the school deaths, things of that magnitude can never escape world public attention. Pictures of small coffins and freshly-dug graves lining up waiting to be filled with bodies are extremely impactful and have gone viral. One American has commented on YouTube that he or she had woken up to find out that his or her country was now “the most hated”.
That may be an overstatement. First of all, who did the bombing is a question not yet settled. Let alone why.
But amid all the arguments regarding the responsibility for the little girls’ deaths, one thing is undeniable: They would have still lived had it not been for the “preventative attacks” which caused everything to spiral out of control.
It doesn’t matter who wins in the end, and how quickly the end will come. The world will never be the same. History will be reviewed. Global citizens will change long-established opinions on who the heroes and villains of the world are. The relevance of the United Nations will be questioned like never before. Minab deaths may even influence governments’ decision when it comes to choosing which side to take.
Piyabutr bombshell latest Orange setback
March 3, 2026: It’s not his departure from the People’s Party, but “how” he left it.
Piyabutr Saengkanokkul has been a respected figure at the party, a spiritual guide if you will. But with or without his presence, the party was functioning unaffected. Many supporters, rivals and critics of the Orange party have not said much about him, actually, and his name only returned to the news during the election campaign when the People’s Party needed all the help it could get.
So, it should have been that whether he stays or goes does not matter much. It’s not the case, apparently. His “goodbye” this week has come in the form of an online message that sharply criticised the party. Just when it needed a “Keep going, my dear colleagues” sort of sad but inspiring farewell, the People’s Party got a stinging parting shot.
He said “no theory for a mass party that I have studied” favoured free-for-all operations and taught that groups of alphas were unnecessary. This is a subtle remark, as the People’s Party certainly has its own leadership structure. He might be referring to the existence of “spiritual leaders” whose political roles have been limited by legal bans.
Those “spiritual leaders” were active just before February 8 but, by and large, they had kept a low profile. Piyabutr’s comment suggested that they did not get the respect they deserved within the Orange apparatus. The remark indicated he he was sulking.
Not only that. The “farewell” lambasted leading People’s Party members lashing out against one another on a weekly basis. Disagreement is common within such a big organisation, he admitted, but adding that it should have been dealt with within its walls, and any public comment should have come after thorough internal debates and considerations.
There’s more. Piyabutr’s post said “the mass party theory” never favoured a caste system that virtually elevates senior members into some kind of elite. He said the party must never become “a vehicle” for anyone’s hidden purpose to get a higher status. (Whom he was referring to is the million dollar question. Was he attacking certain leaders? Or was he talking about some that sought to be the party's election candidates?)
Also, he bemoaned poorly-planned decentralization of party powers that made some satellite units “uncontrollable”.
Last but not least, the screening. He said it wouldn’t help if the party had a large number of members but they did not have its core ideology in their blood. Election candidates and those rejected as election candidates are also a focus on his criticism.
He said now that he had done all he could for the party, he would now concentrate on writing and giving lectures. Such a “farewell” was not his first, but it was the last thing the People’s Party needed after February 8.
American logic
March 2, 2026: Can you shoot a man because you think he’s strong or will be strong enough to harm you?
It’s different from shooting a man fearing he will imminently rob you. That’s preemption, and what matters is whether he was actually plotting to do so or not.
Shooting a man because he has the capacity to hurt you _ he may have acquired a gun or is planning to definitely buy it, and everybody knows he has been hating you for ages _ is different. Yes, he may have got or will get a gun. Yes, he has been heard cursing you. But no, you are not fearing he “will” hurt you. You are just fearing he “might” hurt you maybe two years from now.
So far, “Iran might …” is the American logic behind the attack that started it all. Several reports quoting US intelligence information itself said no evidence has been found indicating an imminent Iranian aggression toward the United States. What matters in this case, therefore, is the question whether Donald Trump’s White House can strike Iran and wipe out its leaders without consulting Congress.
Trump’s supporters are asking what’s wrong with removing a potential threat. Critics are saying that anyone can have suspicion, and if you can kill someone based on suspicion alone, anybody can kill anybody and what we have is a full-blown anarchy, and by this logic, Russia justifiably invaded Ukraine because of fear that the smaller country would one day become a threat, with NATO obviously supporting it.
The US Constitution and laws are vague about wars and military actions that could protect American interest. A full-scale war absolutely needs congressional approval, whereas the president has powers to go unilateral when it comes to lesser military plots to protect the country. (This is also a big subject for debate, because while it might allow America to attack others without declaring a war, the Cambodian government, for example, cannot send warplanes to Thailand and tell the world it just wanted to bomb a military base that might cause Cambodia problems in the future.)
With the consequences of Trump’s decision now threatening to endanger the world’s stability, he has obviously embarked on something as big as declaring a war (even from Trump’s own words, it’s not an in-and-out secret military operation), many people are saying Congress should have been consulted.
It’s a hair-splitting legal exercise in the United States. Justifiable fear? Unfounded fear? Thinly-veiled claims designed to re-engineer the political structure of a major Muslim country? And so far, previous tweets of Trump have not even come into play yet. Unmistakable records show him predicting online that former presidents would be using military actions against other countries to boost or re-boost their local popularities. What Trump had said earlier, that it would be a crying shame if those presidents did not consult the Congress, will come back to haunt him.
Meanwhile, Thailand’s major opposition party is urging “restoration of world order” and respect for international law.
The People’s Party was apparently the first Thai political camp to indirectly criticise the attacks on Iran by America and Israel and Tehran’s response. The inexplicable strikes on Iran, which led to global criticism against the superpower and its major ally and widespread legal debate in the United States on whether an American political leader has illegally put country and world interest in danger, and the Iranian reaction are fanning fears of a big multi-national war.
The Orange party’s carefully-crafted statement did not openly call out Washington and Israel, but, in it, the party all but pointed out that the world order was being dangerously twisted. The party stated that the UN Charter needs to be respected in a world simmering with high geopolitical tension. This is a subtle criticism of the United States, which should be responsible for keeping that tension at a manageable level, not heightening it.
“Amid extremely-high and uncertain geopolitical tension, to be firm on the world order based on international rules of the UN Charter, and to respect all sovereignties equally will be a great shield,” the People’s Party’s statement said. It added that Thailand would benefit from that kind of respect.
The statement calls for measures to ensure safety of Thai nationals and immediate ceasefire.
When mask comes off, there’s no putting it back
March 1, 2026: Fear and respect can co-exist, but most of the time the former cancels out the latter.
Most of the time you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have the Bible on one hand and gun on the other. You can’t kill and turn a blind eye to the sufferings of countless innocents and then succeed in convincing people that you love peace.
You can’t activate warplanes, deploy aircraft carriers, drop bombs or launch missiles and seek the Nobel Peace Prize. You can’t call others “dictators” when you yourself don’t ask those who matter around you.
You can’t rule by fear and tell everyone you are a nice guy. You can’t call yourself democratic when the most fundamental part of democracy is kept in the dark while you carry out your secret agendas. You can't pretend to care about some but ignore others when they all are basically the same.
You of all the people must know all of the above. You have just made a definite choice to remove all the doubts about your image. What the world is gaping at is you saying “No more respect? Fine, then so be it. How about this?”
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