WE ARE in a time of Wag the Dog on super-strong steroids.

Wag the Dog is a film from 1997 starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Woody Harrelson, among others. I don’t remember actually ever seeing the central figure in the movie, the United States president.

The plot goes something like this. The fictional US president Michael Belson is caught in a sexually compromising position with an underage girl in the White House Oval Office, just days before he is due to run for re-election.

He then calls in an elite spin doctor, Conrad Bean, to create the mother of all diversions so that he can win re-election. Bean, played by De Niro, fabricates a war without firing a single bullet with Albania to divert attention from the unfolding scandal.

They decide to bring in a Hollywood producer Stanley Motss, played by the brilliant Hoffman, to create phoney war footage, a catchy theme song (written and performed by Willie Nelson). They even manufacture refugees and orphans from the fighting that has never taken place.

When the CIA find out about the fake war, they complain that there can’t be a war because they didn’t start it. They try to scupper the pretend war by announcing that the war was real but coming to an end causing focus to switch back to the original disgraceful actions of the president.

Hoffman’s character then comes up with the idea that you can’t have a war without a hero, so he creates a narrative that a soldier has been left behind enemy lines, or, as the new song by Willie Nelson says, “discarded like an old shoe.”

They find a jailed soldier named Schumann, played by Harrelson, to play the part over which they can create T-shirts and displays of public support, such as throwing laced-together training shoes to hang over telephone wires.

Schumann is actually a sex offender (sounds familiar!) who they have to dispose of in a fake plane crash that he was allegedly using to escape captivity.

The collaborators come up with a full-scale military funeral in honour of Schumann. But later Hoffman’s character gets more and more annoyed that his contribution to this deception will never be known and is soon announced as having died from an alleged heart attack. The president subesequently wins re-election with the story of his sexual assault on the young girl is buried.

Why bother staging a fake war when you have the power and complete lack of morals to have a real one?

This is clearly what the all-too-real President Donald Trump is relying on in his unprovoked and completely illegal attack, alongside Israel, on Iran.

To suggest that Trump needs a diversion from the very plausible accusations against him of paedophilia is clear for all to see. There are at the very least serious questions for him to answer which he has appeared to mobilise his entire largely unqualified and bombastic administration to cover up.

But there is far more going on than this.

Firstly, the far-right Israeli governing coalition really wants Iran annihilated. It is an open secret that Israel has undeclared and therefore uninspected nuclear weapons. There is increasing evidence that Saudi Arabia has nuclear weapons and even financed Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

I will never argue for any country to have nuclear weapons but the idea that everyone else can but Iran — and anyone else Israel and the US is not friendly with — can’t is plainly absurd.

But Iran has long said that it does not want nuclear weapons and has even issued a religious edict against having them.

I do realise that for some reading this Iran can never be trusted by its word. I really do understand the reasons for not trusting a regime that hijacked the 1979 revolution. But, given the religious zealotry of the Iranian regime I find it hard to not take that position seriously.

In any case the killing by the US and Israel of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei actually makes it more likely that Iran, if it has the opportunity, will want to have nuclear weapons. The religious opinion, or fatwa, marking nuclear weapons as immoral was issued by Khamenei. A new leader may take a different view.

Iran may also come to the conclusion that those nations opposed to the US-led axis of chaos that have nuclear weapons, such as North Korea, appear relatively safe from attack.

We must also remember that first and foremost Trump is about using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. He is essentially a con-artist and a gangster who does not shy away from using force to enforce his will.  

Trump acts on a deep-seated racism and sense of white superiority which he has demonstrated time and time again (which I set out in a recent feature).

He has made billions of dollars during his second term and seems intent on leaving his name on as many Washington DC institutions as he possibly can, including the Kennedy Centre and the White House itself with the new ballroom.

He has even sought to make it a condition of federal funding for institutions to bear his name.

But perhaps most brazenly, he recently ordered billions of dollars of US taxpayers’ money to be diverted into what amounts to an offshore bank account for his so-called Gaza Peace Board, that he controls for life, seemingly without any oversight.

He is robbing the US to set up a slush fund for use on any whim that takes his fancy.

The fact that far-right Israeli politicians have been trying to convince US administrations for many decades to attack Iran and have seized on an extremely vulnerable and easily flattered Trump ego to achieve their goal is far from surprising.

Trump and most of his predecessors have never had a problem murdering or incarcerating the leaders of other countries.

There are so many to mention but examples include Patrice Lumumba, Maurice Bishop, Nelson Mandela, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, Nicolas Maduro, Khamenei and many others. Trump has no scruples or concern for international law, which he clearly believes applies to everyone else but the US.

The common denominator has always been greed and the need to seize and control the resources that these nations have to send a message out about control and power.

What seems certain to me is that future imperialist adventures by the likes of Trump will also be about seeking to profit from vital resources.

The most vital resource for human survival is water and this, I fear, will be next on the agenda.

The United Nations warned recently the world has reached the point of irreversible damage with a water crisis affecting three-quarters of the global population.

Only 3 per cent of all water on the planet is freshwater, and of that small fraction, approximately 2.5 per cent remains locked away in glaciers, ice caps and underground aquifers.

This limited supply must serve nearly eight billion people and the likes of Trump will go all-out for control of the Earth’s dwindling water supply.

These murderers will seek to exercise even more control over who lives and who dies.