Mike's Minute: My observations on week two of the war

My observations on week two of the war. 

I'm as convinced as ever I was that this thing is over in the four week-ish window they said it would be. 

If true, it means we should not have spent the week guessing when it will be over because we have already been told. 

If I worry about anything it's miscalculation. The trouble with the miscalculation is we don’t really know if it is or not because most of what we hear is from the President and his Secretary of War, both of whom are cartoonish in their persona. 

To say out loud he was surprised at the size of the Iranian navy is shocking. To say out loud, and both have, that they were surprised Arab states got attacked is even more shocking. 

But then this was a bloke yesterday travelling through middle America telling the crowds at a rally that prices were coming down, so my faint hope is even though he is completely detached from reality, the people in the uniforms aren't. 

I have no doubt Iran is fairly flattened and their ability to do a lot going forward that would bother the Western world is now severely limited. 

But I also know oil isn't flowing and my equal bet is more people are worried about oil than they are about Iran. 

That’s why this war, polls show, has no buy-in. We don’t care and we never did. Mind you, we may have been saved from ourselves of course because we would care if the Iranians ever really got nuclear weapons. 

So if this thing ends within a month or so and oil is back to $68 a barrel, all in all, it will have been worth it. 

It also shows beyond a shadow of doubt that renewables are nowhere near the answer, given when the Strait of Hormuz got closed, we didn’t all turn on our windmills. 

But at the end of week two what I know is this: the economy is everything. 

Economics is everything and this war will end not because Iran has been beaten, but because oil is king, petrol drives economies and Americans are voting later this year. And if they can't afford the bills because their President got sucked in by Israel, he's toast. 

And as mad as Trump is, he's no idiot. 

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