SO WHO is winning the war? Isis? US? The Kurds (remember them?) The Syrians? The Iraqis? Do we even remember the war? Not at all. We must tell the truth.

So let us now praise famous weapons and the manufacturers that begat them.

Share prices are soaring in America for those who produce the coalition bombs and missiles and drones and aircraft participating in this latest war which — for all who are involved (except for the recipients of the bombs and missiles and those they are fighting) — is Hollywood from start to finish.

Shares in Lockheed Martin — maker of the “All for One and One for All” Hellfire missiles — are up 9.3 per cent in the past three months. Raytheon — which has a big Israeli arm — has gone up 3.8pc. Northrop Grumman shares swooped up the same 3.8pc. And General Dynamics shares have risen 4.3pc.

Lockheed Martin — which really does steal Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers quotation on its publicity material — makes the rockets carried by the Reaper drones, famous for destroying wedding parties over Afghanistan and Pakistan, and by Iraqi aircraft.

And don’t be downhearted. The profits go on soaring. When the Americans decided to extend their bombing into Syria last month — to attack President Assad’s enemies scarcely a year after they first proposed to bomb President Assad himself — Raytheon was awarded a $251 million (£156m) contract to supply the US navy with more Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Agence France-Presse, which does the job that Reuters used to do when it was a real news agency, informed us that on Sept 23, American warships fired 47 Tomahawk missiles. Each one costs about $1.4m. And if we spent as promiscuously on Ebola cures, believe me, there would be no more Ebola.

Let us leave out here the political cost of this conflict. After all, the war against Isis is breeding Isis. For every dead Isis member, we are creating three of four more.

And if Isis really is the “apocalyptic”, “evil”, “end-of-the-world” institution we have been told it is — my words come from the Pentagon and our politicians, of course — then every increase in profits for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics is creating yet more Isis fighters. So every drone or F/A-18 fighter-bomber we send is the carrier of a virus, every missile an Ebola germ for the future of the world.

Think about that. Let me give you a real-time quotation from reporter Dan De Luce’s despatch on arms sales for the French news agency. “The war promises to generate more business not just from US government contracts but other countries in a growing coalition, including European and Arab states... Apart from fighter jets, the air campaign [sic] is expected to boost the appetite for aerial refuelling tankers, surveillance aircraft such as the U-2 and P-8 spy planes, and robotic [sic again, folks] drones... Private security contractors, which profited heavily from the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, also are optimistic the conflict will produce new contracts to advise Iraqi troops.”

This is obviously outrageous. The same murderous bunch of gunmen we sent to Iraq are going to be let loose to teach our “allies” in Syria — “moderate” secular militias, of course — the same vicious tactics they used against civilians in Iraq.

And the same missiles are going to be used — at huge profit, naturally — on the peoples of the Middle East, Isis or not. Which is why De Luce’s report is perhaps the most important of the whole war in the region.

I’ve always argued that the civilian victims of these weapons manufacturers should sue these conglomerate giants every time their niece or grandfather is killed. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinians used to keep the bits and fragments of US-made missiles that killed their innocent relatives, with the idea that one day they might be able to take the companies to court. Lebanese civilians did the same.

But they were given “compensation” — with whose blessing, I wonder? — and persuaded not to pursue the idea, and so the armaments manufacturers, made so palpable in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, got away with it. There are many lawyers in New York ready to take up these cases — I’ve met a few of them in the US — on a pay-if-you-win basis.

But so far, no takers. It’s time there were. Why should the merchants of death get away with it?

In the meantime, the Pentagon can keep pushing the bills through. “It’s awfully hard to say no when you’re at war,” a guy with “links” to the weapons industry said last week. You bet it is. He says, by the way, that BAE Systems is doing pretty well out of the current crisis.

Think about that. And pray, of course, for the 200,000 dead in the Syrian war. Where is Napoleon III: I have always nursed the suspicion that readers are far better educated than the journalists they read in their papers. Here’s further proof from Irish reader John Hanamy of Limerick whose letter arrived in my mail bag in Beirut last week with the following stunning comparison between Italy after the Napoleonic wars of 1815-1848 and the Middle East after the Cold War. I’ll quote him direct — and readers will have to reach for their Italian histories if they wish to destroy this theory.

“Austria controls Italy but does not rule directly,” Hanamy writes about the 19th century. “US controls most Arab states but not directly (at present) . When Italian nationalists attempted to form a government in an Italian state, Austria or its client states would intervene to crush it. 1820-1821

(Arab Spring?) . When Arab states attempt to form a government that represents the population, the US and its allies engineer to crush it. Savoy and Piedmont client states, Naples, Sicily corrupt kingdoms. Egypt and Turkey client states...”

Our prescient reader from Limerick concludes that Austrian power was broken by the French under Napoleon III in 1859 and that Italy became a united country in 1861, but that it is “too early to say” what will happen in the Middle East because “we are still decades off the appearance of a power capable of challenging the US”.

I don’t know if Mr Hanamy is a pensioner or a mere student of history — but mark this guy’s name down as a future Middle East correspondent. !

By arrangement with The Independent

Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2014