In the first weeks of the US-led war against Iraq in 1991, my friend Christopher Hitchens, who opposed the war, had a classic clash on US television with the actor Charlton Heston, who supported it.

“Two years from now, Iraq would have attacked Israel with nuclear weapons,” claimed Heston in justification for US military action, which Hitchens described as an act of “instantaneous barbarism”.

“Can he [Heston] tell me clockwise what countries have borders with Iraq?” asked Hitchens, to which Heston confidently replied: “Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, Russia, Iran.” Since Bahrain is an island far from Iraq and Russia is 1,200 miles away, Hitchens retorted: “You have no idea where the country is on the map, but you are prepared to bomb it.”

At this point the CNN interviewer, who appeared in awe of Heston, made a mild intervention on his behalf, saying that “an instantaneous command of the geography of the region” was unnecessary in a discussion of the war.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hitchens in a devastating riposte. “If you are going to bomb a country you might pay it the compliment of knowing where it is.” A clearly nettled Heston angrily accused Hitchens of insulting him by delivering “a high school geography lesson”, inviting a derisive response from Hitchens who told the famous actor “to keep his hairpiece on”.

The exchange is relevant today because Donald Trump and his advisers evidently shared Heston’s ignorance of the geography of the Gulf region when they started, together with Israel, to bomb Iran on 28 February. Had they looked at the map more carefully, they might have noticed that the entire 615-mile-long northern side of the Gulf is Iranian territory.

At the eastern exit from the Gulf is the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide shipping channel through which in normal times pass tankers carrying a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Opposite Iran on the south side of the Gulf, within easy range of Iranian missiles and drones, are located some of the wealthiest, most fragile and most vulnerable states in the world: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Iraq to the north and Oman to the south are also in the firing line.

The vulnerability of the Gulf states stems from their dependence on the Strait of Hormuz. But they are also home to a huge, vastly expensive and largely indefensible concentration of oil and gas facilities. A single cheap Iranian drone poses sufficient threat to close them down. When a drone or missile does get through without being hit by an interceptor missile, the world witnesses – despite vain efforts by local authorities to suppress information about the level of destruction – spectacular fires erupt and columns of oily black smoke rise into the sky.

The reputation of the Gulf states as safe........

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