Trump’s Iranian strike – and the predictable reactions
DANIEL JUPP
AS US and Israeli forces finally struck key Iranian targets yesterday in joint operations dubbed Epic Fury by the Americans and Roaring Lion by the Israelis, perhaps the one reaction nobody can claim to have experienced is surprise.
If ever an attack was signalled for weeks or months in advance, this was it.
Nor can anyone accuse the Trump administration of failing to pursue peaceful solutions, since the strikes come after repeated warnings were ignored, after massacres of Iranian dissidents, and after months of negotiation during which Iran kept funding terrorism and kept pursuing nuclear weapons development.
Multiple factors have led to this point. Iran’s long sponsorship of international terrorism, as old as the regime of the mullahs as a whole, surely takes primary responsibility for this conflict. Multiple US administrations have had to face the question of how to deal with Iran’s explicit threats (the regular chants of Death to America in the legislative chambers and public rhetoric of its leaders) as well as its more covert but still fairly obvious backing of terrorist groups across the Middle East.
The Obama and Biden administrations were notoriously accommodating towards the Iranians, to put it mildly, with no real cessation of Iranian hostility to show for those overtures. Trump’s administration have attempted the same negotiations using both carrot and stick, with no greater change of Iranian policy so far as regional and global destabilisation goes.
As Israeli and US forces act, some familiar voices will attempt to have us all forget that the mullahs spent the last 40 years building a terror network that encompassed the funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi pirates and just about any extremist Islamic terror group you can think of (excepting only those who, for internal Islamic schismatic reasons, represent a rival branch of terror). Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, for instance, quickly issued a statement on the strikes that eerily echoed the words of the Iranian regime itself. Here is what Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X in the immediate wake of the attacks:
‘Netanyahu and Trump’s war on Iran is wholly unprovoked, illegal, and illegitimate.’
And here is what Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party released not much later:
‘The unprovoked attack on Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of aggression that endangers us all. This is yet another illegal US intervention in an oil-rich country, for which there is no justification.’
Both of these statements, as well as indicating how much Western parties of the extreme left echo the Iranian regime, illustrate the line of response on these strikes we will see from everyone who opposes them. The words illegal, illegitimate and unprovoked will occur with great frequency.
We will be told that these strikes break ‘international law’. Rather amusingly, in a dark way, one of the first to tell us this was Tony Blair’s former chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who pondered their legality on an episode of the podcast he shares with an equally egregious ‘expert’, the failed minor Tory minister Rory Stewart. Campbell was the man who more than any other was front and centre of the Blair government’s lying to Parliament and the country about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify British and US joint military action there. Campbell cribbed together the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’ used by both Blair and George ‘Dubya’ Bush as the evidential basis for attacking Iraq (a war that resulted in 20 years of boots on the ground, a long disastrous insurgency, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths). Iraqi WMDs threatening the West were, of course, a total fiction, a political ‘spin’ that led to mass slaughter and for which Campbell has never apologised.
Keir Starmer, ever the lawyer, was also keen to cite ‘international law’, which has become as much a shield for every manner of hypocrisy as it is a legal system acknowledged by separate nation states. We are supposed to believe that if the UN rubber stamps a war beforehand, as they did with both Iraq Wars, it is ‘legal’ and therefore ‘good’, whereas if a powerful nation state responds to terrorism against it independently, that is ‘illegal’ and therefore bad. For any nationalist, of course, the whole basis of this argument is meaningless – a nation state must be able to take unilateral action, including military action, or else it is not really a sovereign nation at all, especially when it is responding to any imminent threat or prior sponsorship of attacks against itself.
Starmer has issued both a personal statement on the strikes (the one that cited international law) and a joint statement with France and Germany (which was released by the German Embassy in London). As with Ukraine statements and other recent initiatives, it is clear that the opinions of Starmer, Macron and Merz are frequently aligned, especially on foreign policy as Starmer seeks to ingratiate himself with ‘European allies’ and distance Britain more and more from the US.
What we see from these leaders is a curious and almost comical balancing act as they negotiate between having to acknowledge the obvious evils of an Iranian regime that has repeatedly conducted terrorism and repeatedly refused to forgo its attempts to acquire nuclear weapons (even after the earlier US strike on Iranian deep bunker nuclear development facilities) with their fetish for international law, their appalled dismay at the unilateral approach so often taken by Israel or by the US, and their equally influential need to assuage growing Muslim populations at home.
Take a look at how the joint statement is worded:
‘France, Germany and the United Kingdom have consistently urged the Iranian regime to end Iran’s nuclear programme, curb its ballistic missile programme, refrain from its destabilising activity in the region and our homelands, and to cease the appalling violence and repression against its own people.
‘We did not participate in these strikes, but are in close contact with our international partners, including the United States, Israel, and partners in the region. We reiterate our commitment to regional stability and to the protection of civilian life.
‘We condemn Iranian attacks on countries in the region in the strongest terms. Iran must refrain from indiscriminate military strikes. We call for a resumption of negotiations and urge the Iranian leadership to seek a negotiated solution. Ultimately, the Iranian people must be allowed to determine their future.’
This is a piece of fence-sitting with obvious posterior splinters. It begins by agreeing completely with all the reasons the Americans and Israelis cite for the strikes. If all that first sentence is true, surely the strikes are justified?
We know, for instance, that the Iranian people, or at least a very large number of them, did recently rise up against the oppressive mullahs. We know that this was an organic uprising and not one created by some kind of colour revolution funded by the West, since it was very much a series of spontaneous outbreaks in various Iranian cities rather than a single and directed affair. And we know this uprising was brutally and barbarically suppressed with mass killings (particularly of rebellious Iranian youths, especially females rejecting theological rules on dress and behaviour).
The cowardice comes in the second paragraph of the joint statement and that desperate sop to Muslims in Western nations (and to extreme leftists) where Starmer, Macron and Merz apologetically distance themselves as much as possible from the strikes:
‘We did not participate in these strikes, but are in close contact with our international partners, including the United States, Israel, and partners in the region. We reiterate our commitment to regional stability and to the protection of civilian life.’
It reads almost as if these ‘leaders’ are directly begging the Iranians not to include them in any retaliatory strikes, or at the least directly begging radicalised Muslims and leftists within their own nations to keep voting for them. It is a statement which tries to be all things to all men, to appease everyone at once – just enough support to the US to claim a moral distance from Iranian crimes, and just enough distance from the US and Israel to claim a moral distance from the strikes as well.
Ultimately, it’s a pitiful middle ground vacillation that expresses neither resolve nor conviction in either direction and which, in a different way, is as morally abhorrent as the manner by which Campbell and Blair spun the nation into war some 23 years ago. Back then, we had outright lies and a fake dossier the security services had privately contradicted publicly presented as firm evidence for military action. Today, we have an equally loathsome reality, which is that the West is full of people and parties that prefer the brutal mullahs and their terrorist proxies to the West itself, that a large part of responses on these conflicts are decided by propaganda suffused with anti-Semitism, and that senior Western leaders, while perhaps no longer nodding dogs for US military adventures are, in a far worse and even more cynical fashion, delivering statements controlled by their fear of the Muslim response and the Muslim vote in their own nations.
The mullahs themselves are well aware of these issues in our nations, and have more than noticed both hard left support for Muslims no matter what, and the ‘woke right’ hatred of Jews manifested as a detestation of any war or military action that Israel conducts or supports. Indeed, Iran’s foreign minister directly appealed to these forces, knowing that they will be highly critical of the Trump administration for taking this step, stating that Trump was putting ‘Israel First’ and ‘America Last’ (the isolationist and anti-Semitic rhetoric of those like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who frame all Middle East conflict and all US involvement as a Jewish-Israeli conspiracy).
The reality, though, is that there are very obvious rational justifications for both giving the Iranian regime a nudge towards extinction and distinguishing that from the failed neocon wars that characterised the last 25 years of costly and pointless conflict under the direction of those who hate Donald Trump. The President’s record has been one of peace and negotiation rather than war, far more than any of his recent predecessors. But if limited direct action can achieve the fall of an enemy regime that threatens America, he has shown a pragmatic willingness to authorise action when it really counts as well.
Trump despises both fruitless war with no end and accommodating weakness with no spine, and that combination suggests a better hope that these strikes will work out to the good than anything I have ever seen from his critics.
This article (Trump’s Iranian strike – and the predictable reactions) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Daniel Jupp
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