This is the fourth in a five-part series on the US war with Iran

“Twelve per cent of the world’s population live in the West. The rest live outside of it. We cannot project a Western lens onto a world that is overwhelmingly non-Western” —Kishore Mahbubani, former president of the United Nations Security Council

Under President Donald Trump’s command, the US military is responsible for the killings of more than 210 persons in the southern Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific, the vast majority in the Caribbean under the pretext that they were all drug smugglers.

To date no credible evidence has been provided.

Perhaps it was just some perverse reality show to justify invading and plundering a whole nation of its oil and other resources. That nation? Venezuela.

Iran would be next on his menu — to vastly different results.

According to the latest Washington Post-Ipsos poll, 68 per cent of respondents said the war in Iran was not worth fighting. Just 28 per cent said it was worth it.

Some weeks ago, Democratic senator Peter Welch, of Vermont, took part in a hearing in the US Senate that placed the spotlight on the war that began on March 28. That bombing campaign against Iran, according to Mr Welch’s testimony, was one of the most intense air campaigns in the history of air warfare. Let’s repeat that: in the history of warfare. This is what bought on this global poly-crisis.

By the numbers as per the initial round of fighting beginning on February 28, the relevant Senate committee heard:

• The US, before the so-called initial ceasefire, carried out 13,000 airstrikes

• Israel carried out more than 10,000 strikes

• Both belligerents dropped tens of thousands of munitions, all within an eight-week period during the opening phase of the attack on Iran

Targets included a synagogue. There are 100 of them in Iran, with 20 to 30 being active. Iran has an ancient, vibrant, non-Zionist Jewish community that goes back continuously for 2,700 years to the 6th century BCE.

Mr Welch added the following in relation to the wanton destruction of Iran’s infrastructure before May:

• Sixty hospitals destroyed

• Forty-four schools, including universities, destroyed

• Major pharmaceutical plants associated with 200,000 jobs destroyed

• Scores of residential buildings in major cities, particularly Tehran, destroyed

• Petrochemical and steel plants destroyed

This is not the full extent of the damage to civilian infrastructure by far. Nor does it take into account the wanton slaughter of civilians in Lebanon by Israel.

Ironically, the vast majority of military targets in Iran and even whole factories producing weapons buried deep under the Zargos Mountains remain intact, notwithstanding US and Israeli claims.

Forty per cent of these attacks have taken place in Tehran, the largest city and capital with a population of 9.8 million. With the surrounding suburbs taken into account, you are looking at a broader region with an estimated population of 14 million to 16.8 million. Those are the attacks that took place before the faux ceasefire.

Yet the US and Israel still lost the war.

• Rolfe Commissiong is the former MP for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21)