PROGRAMMING NOTE: Because there was so much emphasis on the Iran war today I’m going to repeat something I did a couple of Mondays ago and run through several war updates with just a couple of additional stories to round things out.
TODAY IN HISTORY
March 23, 1879: A small Chilean army defeats a much smaller Bolivian force at the Battle of Topáter, which helped trigger the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific. The conflict, fought over a variety of issues including control of Pacific shipping routes and nitrate deposits in the region, ended with Chile victorious over a Bolivian-Peruvian alliance. The resulting settlement saw both defeated countries ceding territory to Chile, including Bolivia’s entire parcel of Pacific coastline.
March 23, 1991: The rebel Revolutionary United Front, with the support of Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, invades Sierra Leone, kicking off the 1991-2002 Sierra Leone Civil War. Sierra Leone’s government eventually emerged victorious thanks in part to substantial foreign assistance, particularly from the UK. The RUF was later charged with committing a vast array of war crimes. Taylor became president of Liberia in 1997 but lost power in 2003 toward the end of the overlapping Second Liberian Civil War. Extradited to The Hague, Taylor was tried and convicted in 2012 on 11 war crimes counts and sentenced to 50 years in prison by the post-war Special Court for Sierra Leone.
WAR UPDATES
IRAN
Donald Trump gave everybody a big new plot twist for his sweeps week Iran war event on Monday, postponing his threatened obliteration of Iranian power plants (absent the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz) for at least five more days while declaring that US and Iranian representatives “have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East.” The Iranian government quickly poured cold water over that claim, but its denial may be based on a technicality—the “conversations,” as Trump put it, may have passed through a mediator or mediators rather than directly between the US and Iran. An Axios “source with knowledge of the discussions” is claiming that the governments of Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey spent Sunday relaying messages between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and an unnamed Iranian official.
