History doesn’t repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it often rhymes. And a century and a half after he said it, the rhyme is sometimes captured on film. The first time the evening news showed a crowd toppling a statue was in 2003, in the days following the liberation of Baghdad. The tipping point of tyranny has since become such a mainstream media staple that networks have been known to pay the locals to perform it on cue. The shot doesn’t need commentary or caption; everyone’s seen it so many times before. But the day after watching the decapitation of the Iranian regime, Australian audiences got an additional blast of déjà vu. Because that happy, red-green-and-white-striped-flag-waving crowd in the Melbourne CBD on 27 February 2026 looked remarkably like the happy, red-green-and-white-striped-flag-waving crowd we saw on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on 7 October 2023. If you don’t speak Farsi or Arabic, they sounded very similar, too. So perhaps the likes of Grace Tame, Lidia Thorpe and Adam Bandt are right; perhaps there really is a moral equivalence between Middle East protagonists and, ergo, between the opinions of their respective diasporas. Perhaps, as certain community leaders have been trying to persuade Virginia Bell as she settles into her royal commission role, the problem of Islamophobia in Australia really is just as big as the problem of antisemitism. From which we might infer that for some time now, gangs of Australian Hasidim have been fire-bombing mosques, daubing lines of Torah on kebab shop windows and taking pot shots at people leaving Friday prayers. ‘Why wouldn’t the ABC have told us about that?’ you might ask. Because the ABC, in its commitment to even-handed, unbiased reporting, doesn’t want to appear antisemitic, of course.

It would be wonderful if historians could look back on 26 February 2026 not just as the day Israel and the US launched a devastating attack on Iran, but as the first day of The War which Ended all Wars. For most of human history, the prosecution of war has depended on powerful men being able to make other people do all the fighting while keeping well out of harm’s way themselves. And most conflicts have dragged on longer than they needed to because even governments with huge armies and bottomless war chests found it very difficult to get close enough to the enemy’s head to chop it off. The Kennedy, Carter and Bush administrations got no closer to taking out Fidel Castro, Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein with bombers, Navy Seals and the CIA than Claus von Stauffenberg got to Hitler with his briefcase. But in recent months the goalposts of war have moved dramatically. As Ukraine has shown, cheap drones have almost levelled the playing field between countries with small armies and countries with big ones. And enhancing the performance of drones and conventional weaponry with AI has produced results which not long ago would have been science fiction. In the wreckage of his lounge, the final seconds of the life of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind the October 3 attacks, looked like they were captured on one of his kid’s iPhones. Then came footage of the removal of most of Hezbollah’s leadership in a single strike on a single building in Beirut. Then came the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it abduction of the President of Venezuela. And a few weeks later the coup de grâce; aerial footage of the killing of the world’s greatest terrorism sponsor – and the extermination of his entire command structure – in his Tehran headquarters. All within hours, if not minutes, of it happening. We can be sure that everything viewed on Australian phones, laptops and TVs was watched on much larger screens and even more closely by the small number of people not subject to internet bans in Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang. And, more importantly, by their bosses. ‘Yikes,’ Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un must have thought. ‘If they can get to those blokes there, how safe am I here?’ And since then, in a European capital, some other important men – and this being the West, women – have presumably met to ask what is to them an equally daunting question: ‘We’re all agreed, then, that the actions of the self-serving warmongers Trump and Netanyahu are in breach of international law and UN resolutions. But if this really is the war which ends all wars, how the (Swedish expletive) can we justify not giving next year’s gong to both of them?’