Now let's try and understand this very carefully. Donald Trump has gone on record to say that he didn't start Netanyahu's war against Iran. He has also gone on record to say that he did start a war - to stop a war before it could start.

In effect, we are officially witnessing a Schrodinger's war, named after Erwin Schrodinger's famous 1935 quantum mechanics thought-experiment involving a cat that is alive and dead at the same time, illustrating the absurdity of quantum superposition - existing in multiple states - on macroscopic objects.

Let's consider the first explanation: that the Israel-US combine did not start the war. Well, technically the first shot was probably not even fired by the Persians, but by Egyptians at the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 BCE when Pharaoh Thutmose III - no relation to US secretary of war Pete Hegseth I - went full-expansionist mode in the Levant. It could well be that Netanyahu convinced Trump that the loss of Megiddo, a royal city in the Canaanite kingdom of Israel - and from which the word 'Armageddon' comes from - needed a fitting response. Egyptians not being up to it, Iranians would have to do.

And then there's Trump's argument of starting a 'preventive' war - more accurately, an 'inoculation' war: introduce an infective material to immunise it against the infection. Never mind that anti-vaxxers like US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr may be unconvinced.

Whichever way the US regime wants to play the Billy Joel song, 'We Didn't Start the Fire'/'We Did Start the Fire But Only So That It Wouldn't Start Burning,' the real challenge is to end it. And in this, like the way we follow all other major competitive sports, we have chosen 'our side', quietly cheering on not so much the wins, but defeats of the side we don't like. And let's be honest about the schadenfreude many of us are feeling when we call up that friend in Muscat or Dubai to check how he or she is doing in their Gulf club.

One special thing about this war is the deluge of information - reliable or otherwise - being churned out. Just when you've finished watching an ex-US Marine being forcibly removed from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing for shouting, 'America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel!', you get a bearded MAGAman looking like a midwestern Jehovah telling us 'libtards' how the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations, had already talked about this 'war for Israel' and that it would end in the Apocalypse - which, he seems to think, is a good thing.

If there's one complaint I have, it's that there's not much from the Iranian side we're getting to see - except the usual images of victimhood and destruction caused by the infidels. I'm not too sure whether this stark asymmetry is helpful for Tehran's propaganda purposes.

But a week into the war, we're deep into Dr Strangelove territory: 'Gentlemen, you can't fight here! This is the War Room!' Except in Trump's case, it's more like, 'Gentlemen, you can't start a war here! I've already started it to stop you from starting it! Let's buy Greenland!'

Imagine the generals in Pentagon trying to brief him: 'Mr President, we've deployed more missiles to prevent the war.' 'Good. But make sure we get more interceptors to stop their missiles, otherwise people will think it's a war. Let's start Operation Epic Puree to get the Ukrainians to give us the interceptors we had given them.'

We've been here before. Or more precisely Herbert George Wells had, when he wrote his very non-prophetic 1914 book - people hadn't discovered reels yet - The War That Will End War. The central thesis of the book was that the result of the war that would be later called World War 1 would make future conflicts impossible. Trump seems to have not got the memo about Wells getting things terribly wrong.

Incidentally, real lives are reportedly being affected. But this could be pure Persian propaganda.