Anyone who wants Britain to join the war in Iran needs their head examined

They don't know what they want to achieve, why they're doing it or what the consequences might be. They are lost in the void.

Photo by Artur Shamsutdinov on Unsplash

The war in Iran is a new kind of conflict. It lacks any sense of meaning. It lacks any single articulable objective or even a motivating incident. It is taking place beyond the shores of reason.

This must surely be the most nihilistic military engagement we have ever lived through. We’re used to wars which were based on lies. My university years were spent protesting against the Iraq war. We know what a false prospectus looks like. We’re also used to the way that wars with a genuine factual basis descend into lies once they begin. But we have never seen anything like this. What’s happening today makes the Iraq war look like a masterpiece of honesty and the consistent application of strategy. It is a war that is so insane its own perpetrators seemingly do not know why they started it.

In the years to come, historians will look back on the origins of this dispute and there will be nothing there for them: no relevant context, no coherent thought process, no series of motivations, no matter how contorted, with which to explain it. No Versailles treaty. No hyperinflation. They will just find a black howling vortex of nothing.

At most they will be able to say: They started it because it was fun. They like thumping things and this was a thing they could thump. They were insane with the most degenerate notions of what it is to be a man and ended up accidentally converting it into a foreign policy.

What disturbs me most is the total inability of people to accept the reality in front of their eyes. I don’t mean Trump and his people. I expect nothing of them. I mean those who should damn well know better. I mean the people on right, left and centre who should have the capacity to analyse this situation with something approaching realism, but settle instead for a shared hallucination of normality.

This is by far the most common reaction. Hardly anyone in the mainstream national conversation is prepared to state the basic reality, which is that the world is run by microdick clinically sub-cognitive narcissist madmen who are going to get us all killed. Instead, they project a sense of tactical and political meaning onto what is, basically, the bloodlust of a screaming child.

It was what we saw this week from Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, from the British press, from world leaders like Mark Carney and Friedrich Merz. They all fought as hard as they could to pretend that we were living in a world of sanity, a world which operates according to the normal rules of motivation and intent and geostrategic alliances. They refused to accept that that world is gone and that their traditional political machinations therefore have one outcome and one outcome only: to force us all into the fire, alongside Israel, Iran and the United States of America.

There’s no point pretending the US knows what it is doing. The Trump administration’s own defenders barely even try. The level of competence is so low that it simply isn’t possible, even as a mental exercise.

It’s unfashionable now to speak of things which actually happened and which had consequences which we might learn from but let’s give it a go anyway. In 2015, Barack Obama succeeded in securing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which lifted sanctions on Iran and allowed it to operate in the global financial system in exchange for free access to its nuclear sites by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. At the time, Israeli leader Benjamin Netenyahu insisted that it would “all but guarantee that Iran will get those nuclear weapons”. In fact, the opposite happened. In the years that followed, Iranian nuclear development activity stopped, except insofar as it was allowed for civilian use as per the terms of the agreement.

In 2018, Donald Trump abandoned the deal and reinstated all sanctions on Iran. There was then a rise in the stockpiling of enriched uranium and the installation of advanced centrifuges. No-one seems to want to mention this anymore, but if there is a nuclear threat from Iran then it is the direct responsibility of Trump and Netenyahu, the two men who are now perpetrating the war.

Last year, Trump said that his military intervention had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear capacity. Two weeks ago, special envoy Steve Witkoff said the state was “enriching well beyond the number that you need for civil nuclear” and was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material”. It is impossible for both these statements to be true.

Witkoff’s comment was itself a replacement for Trump’s previous argument for intervention, which is that he wanted to go in to protect Iranian demonstrators, who were being murdered by the regime. But this argument was then itself replaced by the insistence that intervention was needed to eradicate Iran’s ballistic weapons programme.

Once the war began, the administration lost the ability to maintain any argument at all for over 48 hours, it began to cycle through justifications with each fresh news cycle. On Saturday, the day the bombing began, senior US officials warned that they had intelligence that Iran was about to launch a preemptive attack. On Tuesday, secretary of state Marco Rubio said that it was Israel that was going to strike and American action was therefore required to “preemptively go after” Iran before they could retaliate. This is the precise opposite account to the one that had been released days earlier. Then Trump reverted to the previous position when he insisted: “I think they were going to attack first, and I didn’t want that to happen. So, if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.” On Thursday, that justification had been swapped for another, when Trump again insisted that Iran was on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.

There is simply no consistent position. It is time to stop expecting one. If the administration cannot settle on one justification in the week the war is launched, then it simply does not possess one.

They’re doing this because they think it’s fun. They are lost in dreams of a machismo they do not possess and will never attain and can only demonstrate through the use of murderous force. Contrary to the make-it-up-as-you-go-along defence justifications, this analysis is consistent, coherent and has been demonstrated multiple times. Every statement they make reeks of a primitive form of aggression, of the sort which you see very often when dealing with people with severe issues of self-confidence.

Speaking to ABC News overnight, Trump explicitly spoke about the intervention as a kind of show, a wrestling match basically. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” When Spain rejected Trump’s request to use their bases, he demanded that all trade be cut off with the country. Then, tellingly, he said: “We can use their bases if we want, we can just fly in and use it. Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it”.

US war secretary Pete Hegseth adopted a similar tone when he attacked America’s allies, presumably meaning Britain. Israel, he said, was a “capable partner”, unlike other partners who “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force”. Legality was effeminate. Action was manly. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time, or lives.”

It is perfectly obvious these men have no idea what they are doing, no awareness of the deep-seated psychological demons which are causing them to act this way, or any plan for how they would address the consequences of their actions.

Why knows? Maybe things will turn out OK. That is genuinely possible. Sometimes you get lucky: the regime is so hollow, its defence capacity so weak and its political hold on the country so unsure, that a short sharp shock can bring everything down. That’s kind of what happened in Syria in 2024.

Or perhaps things will be terrible in ways we can barely imagine. Iran’s retaliatory attacks may succeed, now or later, in delivering an atrocity in a neighbouring state, or perhaps against American troops in some other territory. This will then force Trump to become more involved because he will fear looking weak, but he will lack any sense of preparation or patience, so he will lash out in a way that escalates matters.

The point is: We just don’t know. And we cannot formulate an educated guess because the motives of the main actors are non-existent. No-one of sound mind would choose to get involved in an operation with such little clarity.

It is therefore beyond comprehension that the British political debate is where it is. It is truly mind-shattering. The US has started a war without any legal, moral, strategic or political basis whatsoever. And yet instead of raising the alarm about it, the British press’ main question is why Britain is not more involved.

This is not simply a failure of analysis. It is a failure of basic memory. Is Iraq really that long ago? Is it really so beyond the reminiscence-capacity of the British political class that we are incapable of learning lessons from it? Are we really unable to consider, for just a moment, that the events which are taking place today could play out in any number of ways, some of them very grave indeed, and that we might not wish to be involved in them?

The attacks on Keir Starmer focus on several disparate elements which are rarely disentangled. Some of them concern his decision not to allow the US to use British bases for offensive missions against Iran, some on his belated decision to allow the US to launch defensive missions, some on the deployment of British assets to overseas allies like Cyprus and Qatar, and some on a general sense of him being insufficiently slavish and unquestioning in his loyalty to the US.

These decisions require very different judgements - he’s been right about some and wrong about others - but in practice they’re all bundled up together. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: “We are in this war whether they like it or not. What is the prime minister waiting for?” Former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said Starmer made a “big misjudgement” not allowing the US to use British military bases for offensive strikes because it would “weaken our alliance with the United States”. Matt Goodwin, the former academic who got his arse handed to him in Manchester last week, said Keir Starmer is “destroying the special relationship.” Reform leader Nigel Farage said: “The prime minister needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!”

The Express ran with “weak, weak, weak”. Times said: “Allies round on ‘weak’ UK”. But the most prominent piece this week was in the Spectator, by Tim Shipman. It formed the cornerstone of the case against the Starmer government, with the Telegraph reporting it before it was even published online.

Shipman’s piece suggested that the prime minister wanted to help Trump but decided against it after an intervention from energy secretary Ed Miliband. I have no idea whether that’s true or not and I don’t particularly care. What’s fascinating is the framing. The piece behaves like neutral reporting, but over and over again Shipman cites figures who are encouraging Britain to get involved. A member of the Trump administration says: “You’re contributing nothing and you’re not even a good ally”. A Whitehall source complains that “we frequently talk about being shoulder to shoulder with the Americans but, as far as [Trump] is concerned, when it mattered to him we were not.” A former defence chief says: “The UK is kept safe by three things: nuclear weapons, Nato and having America as our principal ally.”

The message is clear. It is the exact message that has been taken up by the British press. The question is not ‘what in god’s name are the Americans doing, have they gone insane?’ It is: Why is Britain not involved?

They want Britain to get involved in an American attack. They want this to take place immediately, without thought, simply on the basis that an American attack is taking place. They want it despite the fact that they do not know why the attack is happening and have no idea what the consequences will be.

The argument is amoral. It does not entertain any notion as to whether the operation is a good thing, either in terms of its stated intentions or whether the approach it adopts will fulfil them. But it is more than that. It is also contrary to any meaningful sense of national pride. The unstated premise of the argument is that Britain should join any American military operation regardless of its own interests, its own views or its own democratic processes. It demands complete and total subservience to American decision-making.

Once upon a time, really not so long ago, the right-wing press would act like Britain’s acceptance of European regulation was an affront to sovereignty. I am old enough to remember when things like lawnmower noise restrictions and the shape of fruit were considered vital matters of national decision-making which had to be resolved in parliament. But that apparently does not apply to the issues raised here - of British military involvement, of international law and of geopolitical rationality.

They are matters of life and death for British servicemen. And yet we are not supposed to even question what our American masters tell us. Just do as we’re told and then afterwards call it patriotism.

I was walking through Sydney’s Hyde Park last weekend, on the way back from a day drinking. A small group of Iranians were dispersing, wrapping up flags and carrying them home, or packing away sound systems, or sitting around chatting while nursing tea. It was not a protest, I don’t think. I suppose it must have been a celebration of the death of the tyrant Ali Khamenei. But you didn’t get the sense that people were really able to celebrate. There was too much uncertainty, too much chaos, too great a chance that more innocent people would die, too intense an anxiety about the future.

Their faces seemed frozen in time, caught at a moment between outcomes, dreams and nightmares ripening in tandem.

The Iranian people are one of the great civilisations of the world. We have watched them for decades now - protesting for their freedom, with a lyricism and an elegance that is specifically Persian. We have watched the films they smuggled out the country, on pain of imprisonment. We have read their novels and sat with them in cafes and hoped together for the death of the oppressor. We have seen pride and determination and dignity on a scale that is hard to comprehend.

So far, at least 1,230 have been killed, with another 70 in Lebanon. Occasionally, in the great funhouse-of-mirrors that is American power, someone in the Trump administration will remember that they exist and claim that this is all happening so they can live in freedom. But mostly, they sneer at the idea of regime change or establishing democracy.

As Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House said this week:

“The White House has clearly not done enough planning. This is not a new state for the US. They’ve had a confrontational relationship with Iran for 47 years. There’s so much depth of knowledge across the US about Iran, scenario planning has been done for years on what to expect should a war develop. Leaving a weak fragmented Iran and letting Iranians fight it out in a civil war is a really just a very sad and pathetic day-after scenario… What’s really going to be the sad reality is that they will have broken Iran and they will have left in place hardline remnants of an old regime that will be equally brutal, equally repressive but economically still very strangled.”

Iranians deserve better. Even if this turns out, by some great stroke of luck, to be liberation, they deserved better. They deserved to be treated like they mattered, like ends not means.

They are a great and proud and beautiful people, the likes of which Trump and Hegseth will never understand. Their fates should not be decided by these ridiculous men, like a drunkard treading on ants. Men who who barely understand what it is they are doing or why they are doing it.

Goddamn them for what they’re doing out there. And god save us from those who would join them.

Odds and sods

Today’s newsletter is available as a podcast - on this page, or through Substack or on Spotify.

My column for the i paper this week was on the Spring Statement, which I thought was pretty good all things considered.

I was unbelievably flattered to take over the whole of Late Night Live this week. I’ve been the UK correspondent for this show for about eight years now, first under Phillip Adams and then David Marr - both titans of Australian journalism. It is a wry, curious, gentle and really rather beautiful show. There are no limits to the things it is interested in. This was the first moment I actually walked into the studio and did it in person. It was a once in a lifetime sort of thing and I loved every second of it. You can listen to it here.

I’m in Melbourne for the next ten days and then figuring out how to get home, which is trickier than I thought it might be when I set out. But hey - there are worse places to get stuck.

I’ve been loving Wonder Man on Disney. I had basically tuned out of Marvel TV but this has been fantastic: witty, very warm and kind-hearted. I usually find Hollywood treatments of Hollywood insufferably smug and that is indeed the least rewarding part of this show. I just like seeing two men who both love the same profession fall in love with each other through it. Great stuff.

Cheers you lot - see you next week. Now fuck off.