A thoughtful Swampian emailer recently reminded me about the Peter Sellers’ 1959 comedy classic, The Mouse That Roared. A tiny European country, the Grand Duchy of Fenwick, has its sole export wiped out by a cheaper US competitor. Facing bankruptcy, the Lilliputian state declares war on America. A contingent of 20 soldiers in medieval armour lands in New York under the command of Tully Bascombe, the principality’s harmless game warden (played by Sellers). The plan is to surrender soon after arriving and thereby win dollops of US aid. “You must remember that the Americans are a very strange people,” says Fenwick’s prime minister. “There isn’t a more profitable undertaking for any country than to declare war on the United States and be defeated.” To cut a long story short, they stumble across the secret Q bomb, a lethal new weapon, and take it back to Fenwick as leverage. Though the weapon is a dud, they lock it in a dungeon and live happily ever after on a renewed export monopoly and wondrous monetary compensation.
Please Swampians, don’t get all pedantic on me. I know that supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is not a comedic groundsman and Iran did not start Gulf war III. Even before Operation Epic Fury, however, Iran was a mouse compared to the American war elephant. After weeks of US-Israeli pummelling, it is now a shadow of its former mouse. Yet if you go by the terms of the 14-point US-Iran memorandum of understanding that Donald Trump signed in the historic Palace of Versailles of all places, Iran is the victor. How on earth did Trump manage to pull off such an improbable defeat having started with such overwhelming advantage?