In August 1990 war broke out in Mesopotamia when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait over an oil dispute. Six months later, on the night of January 17, 1991, the war response of the US and its allies began. On March 20, 2003, the allies again crushed Iraq and razed it to the ground in a few weeks, under nebulous pretexts. Finally, in 2012, Barak Obama put an end to that "silly war".

However, just when everything seemed to have been resolved, a terrible conflict has broken out between Sunnis and Shiites, involving several Islamic nations and currents, also involving Turks and Europeans, and has provoked an intercontinental migratory cycle that has no historical precedent, unless we go back to the pre-medieval Germanic invasions, surely caused by a tremendous cold wave and the weakness of the Roman Empire.

"Until the last moment I have prayed to God, hoping that this would not happen, and I have done everything humanly possible to avoid a tragedy," John Paul II said on the morning of the outbreak of the 1991 war. "In these hours of great danger, I would like to repeat forcefully that war cannot be an adequate means of resolving completely the problems existing between nations. It never has been and never will be!".

On the verge of a new diplomatic collision with the United States, Pope John Paul II also condemned the 2003 war against Iraq. "No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity," the Pope said then, in his annual speech on the state of the world, to diplomats from 175 countries accredited to the Vatican.

The repeated condemnations of the Roman Pontiff, never heeded, show the Pope's extraordinary clairvoyance. There was in them, moreover, something mysterious, which almost hinted at prophecy: "All this [the harshness of the battle] is made all the more painful by the fact that this gloomy panorama is likely to spread in time and space, with consequences as tragic as they are incalculable," he said in February 1991. Effects that, unfortunately, we now see fulfilled, as he had already warned us.

War is undoubtedly one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse - even Francis Ford Coppola knew that!