The rogue madman in the Oval Office has detonated a conflagration there that could send the entire global economy and financial system spiraling into a catastrophe—and not just because or even mainly due to the 23 million barrels of oil per day at risk out of 105 million needed worldwide.

What's really at risk is the underlying global financial system. The latter is a veritable house of cards sitting upon a mountain of debt, leverage, and speculative excess. So it may not have the capacity or resilience to withstand a sudden $200 per barrel oil shock.

Yet and yet. The whole insanely reckless act of launching a sweeping military attack on a nation of 90 million people that had zero capacity to impose military harm on the home territory of the United States is predicated on one of the Great Big Stinking Lies of History namely, that the Iranian regime is a uniquely evil stain on the face of the earth and has spent 47 years bringing injury, mayhem, and death to America and much of the region around it.

The truth, however, is that there's nothing especially unique about Iran's manifold sins at all. It's just another run-of-the-mill authoritarian state run by a medieval theocracy that has imposed one of the most benighted tyrannies of modern times. Accordingly, it has brought untold hardships and miseries to its people, especially via the brutal ruffians of the IRGC.

But that's mainly the unfortunate work of the clerics and their IRGC allies ruling inside its borders. When it comes to the outside world, Iran has invaded not a single neighboring country since 1979 (and indeed, not in the last 300 years before the mullahs).

At the same time, Iran was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein with U.S. and European arms during the 1980s; it has been brutally sanctioned by Washington trade embargoes and economic warfare for the past 30 years; and for decades, it has also been relentlessly assaulted via Israeli assassination squads, saboteurs, and periodic missiles and bombs.

In fact, the whole "leading state sponsor of terror" slogan has more validity as a Bibi Netanyahu campaign theme than it does as an accurate description of the real world.

And, no, the "whadabout the proxies" canard doesn't cut it, either. Not a single one of Iran's so-called "proxies" in the region was concocted out of whole cloth by the mullahs as some kind of mercenary force recruited, trained, and financed by Tehran and artificially implanted in the soil of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza.

To the contrary, the first three of these represented Shiite populations, which aligned with their Shiite brethren in Iran out of confessional ties and due to the fact that they were imperiled in their home countries. After all, there was no Hezbollah until Israel invaded southern Lebanon in the early 1980s and imposed a harsh occupation that left tens of thousands dead, culminating in the genocidal atrocities at Sabra and Shatila.