I want to start with a quote-of-any-day from Thomas L Friedman of the NY Times:
"Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria [or any other conflict region]: 'It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.'”
I'm working through a lot of information about strife in our aquarium world today, and assigning responsibility for that strife isn't always easy. And even when I come to some conclusion about who's to blame for what, the next question is always, what am I going to do about it because we're all in this soup together.
Here's my position based on the reading I've done and trying to keep in mind my own bias in the matters - fast overview before a more detailed report.
The shah of Iran was a member of a privileged royalty. The US helped to depose him and helped set up a dictatorship friendly to their interests (oil). Since then citizens have demonstrated against the religious government, even going so far as to want the shah or his heir returned to the throne. Recent uprisings have resulted in thousands of citizens killed by the paramilitary force controlled by the government.
In Venezuela, Caesar Chavez led a revolution and became head of state. He nationalized the oil industry and this produced social benefits in education, health care and stable government. The US (amid falling oil prices) undermined his rule by supporting a corrupt government of Maduro which took over after the people rebelled because civil institutions had been so badly degraded.
Castro led a 1958 revolution to oust the government of US-backed, mafia-supported Batista believing that the country had become a sugar refinery for the US and a casino-brothel for rich Americans. He instituted a communist government - probably the one successful communist experiment of the last two centuries. Living standards of urban and rural Cubans however are irregular and there is much to criticize in the disproportionate incomes and opportunities afforded different classes.
Sudan is a silent genocide on the scale of Gaza and few are talking about it, largely because few are left alive to do the reporting and even fewer want to listen. As always, it seems, the lives of poor brown-skinned people in hot countries do not get much media attention.
So, I'm confused until I read the next article that confirms or attacks my biases. I have learned to beware such terms as "expert" or "reliable source" or even "research" in those articles, at least until I've checked to see what area of expertise is being referenced and how reliable the source or research is by other objective standards. I spend a lot of time in the mornings (after a bit of geriatric jump-arounds) reading the posts of people I trust in journals from the international Guardian to our local Tyee. The substacks of Charlie Angus, Heather Cox Richardson, Steve Schmidt and Mehdi Hasan are also part of my pre-breakfast fare and Snopes and Wikipedia are my fact-checkers. Now you know my biases, and you can stop reading immediately if those sources offend your sense of accurate journalism.
Even death tolls are not something I want to use as a guide to the allocation of my sympathy. Since when did relative body counts determine compassion? And I know the numbers are rounded off for convenience perhaps, but I don't like that expediency either. It's saying something like, "I know the last person killed was a family member and someone you played with and loved, but we're going to say 70,000 were killed in Gaza instead of 70, 251". Still, those body counts in the war zones of our world today are terrible, and the causes of those wars have been a prime source of my confusion.
I use those aforementioned sources because I have checked their jounrnalists' statements with other voices and have come to trust the authors involved. The Journal of Atomic Scientists and the Journal of Democracy have also provided academic support for positions taken by more popular media writers. And I often need help with understanding academic writing because I am not a scientist and I have no training in international law. I get that help when I need it.
All this may look like a listing of my credentials as if I need to establish myself as some authority, whereas I'm just revealing a list of my preferred information sources so that you can decide whether my statements even deserve your reading time. And you should know that I always approach stories of current events with some degree of scepticism - scepticism rather than cynicism - I hope. George Burns gets the credit for saying, “Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.” Credentials do count for something. I can read. Critically. And I'm blessed with the time and safety to do so.
Here are the major current events in greater detail with the different approaches presented.
War in Iran
On February 28th, the United States and Israel launched a pre-emptive military strike against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the ensuing conflict will be known to history as the 2026 Iran War. Ostensibly the strike was to eliminate the threat of Iran's nuclear bomb capability. Some authorities have said that Iran never had a program of atomic bomb production while others have responded to criticisms by saying that the regime in Tehran is nasty and should be taken out.
I think that regime in Tehran really is and was nasty and their forces killed about 30,000 Iranian civilians in the early months of 2026 and that round number could mask an even higher number of deaths. Imagine telling your daughter not to cut her hair and stand on a street corner waving the hair braid and a face scarf (hijab) shouting the farsi words for "Woman, Life, Freedom" (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) because the morality police will kill her. This happened - the protests and the killings - in a country where women can be raped, scarred with acid and murdered with impunity. The lesser punishments of lengthy prison terms, flogging, and fines are also routinely used to intimidate women. And it's been happening for a long, long time.
In 1979 the king or Shah was deposed by an insurrection orchestrated by religious cleric Ayatollah Khomeini who declared the country to be a theocratic (religious) republic named the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2003 the International Atomic Energy Association found no evidence of the development of nuclear weapons, but by 2007 it reported that Iran's program of enriched uranium and weapons research was "problematic". In its latest report the same International Atomic Energy Agency said that while Iran has an "ambitious" nuclear program and has refused to allow inspections of its damaged sites since the 2025 war, there was no evidence of a structured nuclear weapons program when the 2026 war began.
Relations between Iran and Israel deteriorated through the years with hostilities often resulting in attacks and counter-attacks, and by 2025 the two countries (Israel with US backing of course) were trading rockets. The escalation of internal dissent in Iran in early 2026 resulted in a vicious suppression that caused those more than 30,000 deaths - yes, you read it correctly again and it has been rounded downwards. Many Iranians who had emigrated around the world cheered the openly declared war by the US-Israel axis. Where do matters stand now?
If you have an internal combustion engine in your car, you know one result, and it will get worse. The survivors in the war as always, will have to deal with a far greater pain than rising fuel prices, and again the body counts cannot be used as some index of national grief because it doesn't exist - the national grief, that is. The death of a loved one is felt individually and as deeply by a mother in Detroit as by a brother in Tehran or Tel Aviv. Will the cost buy the desired result of a more compassionate government in Iran - that "regime change" touted as the motivation for the war and the hoped-for consequence of hostilities (hoped-for by so many of the Iranian diaspora in their relative safety)? Does the end justify the means? Can we ignore International Law when it suits us?
In WW2 an American, General Lemay, is given dubious credit for the practice of bombing civilians to "destroy the enemy's will to fight" but in truth, the evil practice had occurred in all conflicts from the start of air power use in wartime, and it was used by all belligerents. This from my research:
General Telford Taylor, Chief Counsel for War Crimes at Nuremberg Trials, wrote that:
If the first badly bombed cities — Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, and London — suffered at the hands of the Germans and not the Allies, nonetheless the ruins of German and Japanese cities were the results not of reprisal but of deliberate policy, and bore witness that aerial bombardment of cities and factories has become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried out by all nations.
We're a long way from today's conflicts. Venezuela next.
2. Venezuela Regime Change
Hugo Rafael Chávez was the president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. His "Bolivarian" process asserted state ownership over all oil and gas reserves, which by the 1990s were controlled largely by US-owned oil companies. The process also saw many social programs in health and education and local governance instituted with assistance from Cuban instructors. Chávez withstood US-engineered coup attempts with the vast support of the population.
Maria Corina Machado, opposition leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, with the aid of her US backers (the oil companies) tried to overthrow the Bolivarian process and thereby return the US-owned oil companies to power. Venezuela's, struggle has been largely about the Venezuelan people controlling their oil and gas versus the dominance of US-owned companies. Enter Nicholas Maduro.
Maduro was Chavez's vice-president and assumed leadership following that president's untimely 2013 death from cancer. He took the country down a path to dictatorship, contriving reelection in 2024 despite evidece of having lost by a wide margin. His government has been labelled authoritarian by the UN Human Rights Watch which stated that thousands of citizens and political opponents have been murdered and that Maduro's regime is financed heavily by drug cartels.
Early on January 3, 2026 a special ops force from the US captured Maduro and his wife and took them to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States. Over 100 (again, the rounding off) Venzuelan and Cuban nationals defending the president, were killed in the abduction. The "operation" has been widely condemned as a violation of international law. Since then, Venezuelan oil production and export has been controlled by US interests.
Maduro was a dictator. He was kidnapped by a foreign power, the United States, to stand trial for drug traffiking. Does the end justify the means? Can we ignore International Law when it suits us?
3. Cuba
In the year after Fidel Castro assumed power in Havana, the United States attempted a coup by invading the island at the Bay of Pigs, but due to various errors and miscommunications the invasion failed. Cuba then, has survived armed assault by US troops and a 75 year campaign of sanctions by the US, including a near-escalation to nuclear war. In that time Cuba has developed state-of-the-art practices in medicine and education and regularly sends medical teams to other countries in Latin America and Africa in their time of need, even offering them to the US after hurricane Katrina.
The retaliation from the US was contained in the Helms-Burton Act of the US Congress which prohibits economic relations with Cuban entities by any jurisdiction foreign or national upon pain of retribution by fine and/or confisation of property. Many of those other jurisdictions, including Canada and the EU have refused compliance with that Act, Canadian MPs John Godfrey and Peter Milliken going so far as to introduce the tongue-in-cheek Godfrey–Milliken Bill, replacing reference to the Cuban revolution with the American revolution. Sponsored by Loyalist descendants, it demanded recompense for United Empire Loyalists and proposed travel restrictions on those trafficking in property confiscated during the American Revolution.
Humour notwithstanding, there are some very unfunny consequences to Cuban independence, Guantanamo Bay and Russian interference being the most memorable for this writer. The former is ugly and contemptuous of a nation's sovereignty; the latter a near Armageddon.
Guantanamo Bay remains a US outpost of 45 acres in and around the Bay of Guantanamo, originally granted to the US in 1903 and 1934 treaties. Since 1959, Cuba has said it wants the land back, but the US navy and other forces say they aren't leaving and have established a detention centre there, at one time (since reversed) claiming that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions because the prison was not on US soil. Only after determined efforts by representatives of some newspapers and politicians pursuing freedom of information requests did the administration acknowledge the number and identification of detainees (779 at the time) and that torture was used to extract information.
Many of us have visted Cuba and admired the land and its people. They field world-class baseball teams that would take the prize if that "World Series" in the US ever became a true world series. There are signs that I have seen and translated as "No one can make it unless all of us make it," and the people seem to live the slogan.
Cuba had one very willing ally in Russia during the Cold War era and that alliance almost cost us all a nuclear holocaust. In 1962, Castro agreed to have Russian ICBM silos installed on the island and when US spy planes identified them as such, president John Kennedy ordered a blockade - a cordon sanitaire - around Cuba. A small fleet of Russian submarines were steaming south through the Atlantic when the blockade order came and the US navy headed on an intercept course.
You know the rest, but the game of who'll blink first had deadly stakes and the fact that we're here today is thanks to one Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov, serving as chief of staff on one of the Soviet submarine flotilla. When U.S. forces dropped depth charge simulators near the submarine to force it to surface, its captain and the political officer believed war had begun and prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo against US ships. Arkhipov refused to agree and because such a launch required the consent of three senior officers, his decision prevented the use of nuclear weapons.
I'm no great admirer of the Russian political system, but as with many things in my world, I can admire parts and dislike others. I admire Vasily Aleksandrovich Arkhipov. I also have high regard for another Russian, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov who was stationed at the Soviet early-warning location Oko. On September 26 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to four more. Petrov correctly judged the reports to be a false alarm and refused to authorize retaliatory launches.
OK. Two saves for their side. Now we have Putin, his oligarchs (as long as they don't get too close to open windows) and the horrible war against Ukraine. So much has already been written about that conflict, from the kidnapping of children to the devastating bombardments of civilian infrastructures, the only thing left to do for concerned citizens of planet earth is to act as if this is a 1962 or 1983 nuclear crisis being acted out in horrible slow motion. Our children and grandchildren may well ask us what we did to give peace a chance.
There's no shortage of organizations working to stop the Putin-Trump connivance, and I explicity so name it to avoid slandering the people of Russia and America. Try the following. My first choices are always Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontièrs, but our PM and Minister of Defence need to hear us as well.
Nova Ukraine: Delivers humanitarian aid, shelters, and medical supplies.
Canada-Ukraine Foundation (CUF): Coordinates humanitarian aid and operates the Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.
Razom for Ukraine: Provides critical medical equipment and emergency response.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): Provides medical, food, and water assistance.
Come Back Alive: A major foundation supplying equipment to Ukrainian defense forces.
Libereco Partnership for Human Rights: Focuses on medical and evacuation assistance.
Russian Antiwar Committee: Comprised of Russian activists, it unites various anti-war campaigns.
The Ark (Kovcheg): Assists Russians fleeing repression for their anti-war stance.
Now, I warned you this would be a long read and for those of you still with me, remember (as I should also) that the starting point was the picking-sides problem.
Iran Regime bad; US-Israel invasion also bad
Venezuela leadership corrupt; US interference also bad
Cuba has problems; US blockade also bad
Palestine survival complicated; Israel program of genocide, bad
And of course I haven't even asked you to consider the tragedies being committed in Palestine and Sudan, or the Crazy Christian support for the atrocities enacted there which is similar to Zany Zionism and just as deadly. Next time. It's Easter and I am going to ressurect some seedlings for a touch of beauty in my part of this world. I will also rewatch some news footage of the astronauts' photos of earth to remind me of all that is worth resurrecting.
Last note goes back to journalist Thomas Friedman from 2024 on the "fish soup" possibility of the Middle East.:
My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to Haaretz in Israel: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.”
I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era — a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.