The debate about Israel / Iran is at risk of being derailed by disinformation. Gaslighting swirls all around it. This is a crazed stab at ‘regime change’, cry Israel’s critics, and we all know what hellish things spring from ‘regime change’. It is an ‘illegal war’ and a ‘war of aggression’, insists the left. And the trump card: it’s Iraq all over again. Both the digital right and digital left are ‘invoking the spectre of Iraq’, in the words of the New York Times. ‘Welcome to Iraq 2.0’, says the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Only worse – Israel’s ‘unprovoked attack’ on Iran has the potential to be ‘far, far more catastrophic’, apparently.
The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.
The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.
Casting Israel as the new ‘regime changers’ and Iran as its Iraq-style victim is a ludicrous corruption of truth. This is the black propaganda of this war. The minimisation of the threat posed by Iran to Israel is as gross a fabrication as was the exaggeration of the threat posed by Iraq to the West. Anyone who laments Israel’s strikes on Iran without mentioning what Iran has done to Israel has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on this topic. Their aim is not to enlighten but to obfuscate, to the end of criminalising Israel and absolving the Islamic Republic.
For the Iraq comparison to carry moral weight, Saddam would have had to have attacked the US and the UK – and savagely. In Britain, which has a population of 70million to Israel’s nearly 10million, he would have had to have funded a terror army that slaughtered 8,400 of our people. And sponsored fanatical militants who fired 35,000 rockets at our cities, causing nearly half a million Brits to be displaced. And fired 2,500 of his own missiles directly at our cities. I was implacably opposed to the Iraq War, but if Saddam had visited such horrors on my countrymen I would have supported action against him. I’m an anti-imperialist, not a hippy.
Regionally, too, the Iraq comparison speaks to the ahistoricism of Israel’s critics. The worst thing about the Iraq War is that it was a violent pummelling of a destitute nation. War with Iran, war with Kuwait, war with its own freedom-yearning Kurdish population, war with America, the UN-enforced partition of its lands, the UN’s sanctions that caused chronic hunger and disease – Iraq was a feeble, pathetic half-nation in 2003. ‘Our’ war against it was pure moral pantomime, with well-known deadly consequences.
Iran, by contrast, is an energetic actor in the Middle East. It does pose a strategic threat. It deploys its proxies to the imperial end of extending its theocratic writ across the region. It has fought brutal proxy wars with Saudi Arabia, most notably in Yemen. And it unquestionably menaces Israel. Its missiles and its proxies’ pogroms are testament to that. Iran’s dream – openly – is to eradicate the Jewish State. Which other nation on Earth would be told to chill out in the face of such an extremist neighbour which in both word and deed had made plain its annihilationist aspirations?
The ‘invoking of the spectre of Iraq’ deserves ridicule. If people want to campaign against US or UK assistance for Israel’s war with Iran, that’s their business. I don’t want to see Western boots on the ground in Iran – let the IDF and the mullahs fight this war that Iran started. But the frothing anger with Israel for waging a supposed ‘forever war’, the feverish depiction of Israel’s leaders as modern-day Bushes or Blairs promising the world nothing but catastrophe, smacks of political infantilism. An addiction to the easy anti-war positions of the 2000s has blinded people to the moral and even civilisational questions raised by the multi-pronged Islamist effort to destroy the Jewish State.
Israel’s critics see themselves as being on the side of peace. Really? In railing against Israel for striking back against the regime that has visited extreme violence on its people, they are essentially instructing the Jewish State to live meekly alongside an existential hazard. They want to maintain a status quo ante in which the permanent threat of annihilation hangs over Israel. They see the existential endangerment of the Jews of Israel as a small price to pay for their own peace of mind. That isn’t ‘peace’ – it’s the displacement of war on to the Jews in order to save non-Jews’ arses.
It’s understandable that Iraq gave rise to a new isolationism. But it’s clear now that concern about that war has curdled into a deep and fretful cynicism where military action of any kind is viewed suspiciously. The role of the ‘Iraq spectre’ in public life is less to promote a principled opposition to Western interference in the affairs of other states than to institutionalise a politics of precaution in which every nation is encouraged to batten down the hatches lest ‘another Iraq’ occur. Between this nervous isolationism and the imperial hubris of those who smashed Iraq, there’s something else: internationalism, a support for democratic liberation everywhere. Israel has a right to defend itself against anti-Semitic tyrants, and Iranians have the right to choose who rules them – those are my uneasy positions.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The moral evasion on display here is off the charts. To compare Israel’s fight against its fanatical tormentors in Tehran with America and Britain’s vain and ruinous war on Iraq is to be wilfully blind to both historical truth and moral principle. First, there’s the fact that Saddam’s regime did not attack us. This was a shattered nation, broken by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the West’s sanctions and bombing raids of the 1990s. In 2003, Iraq barely posed a threat to its neighbours, far less to mighty America or Britain. Washington and London’s depiction of this shell of a regime as a threat to the world was the blackest of black propaganda. It was the lie that unleashed untold horrors.
The Israel-Iran clash is wholly the reverse of this. Iran has attacked Israel ceaselessly and ferociously. Its neo-fascist proxies in Hamas sent a 6,000-strong army into Israel in October 2023 where they raped and murdered hundreds. Its most important proxy – Hezbollah – followed up this pogrom with barrages of missiles into northern Israel. Between Hamas’s pogrom and June of last year, Hezbollah fired 5,000 rockets and other projectiles at Israel. This caused the evacuation of 60,000 people and the deaths of scores of civilians, including 12 Druze kids. Iran itself has directly fired missiles at Israel: 120 ballistic missiles in April 2024; 200 in October 2024.
Casting Israel as the new ‘regime changers’ and Iran as its Iraq-style victim is a ludicrous corruption of truth. This is the black propaganda of this war. The minimisation of the threat posed by Iran to Israel is as gross a fabrication as was the exaggeration of the threat posed by Iraq to the West. Anyone who laments Israel’s strikes on Iran without mentioning what Iran has done to Israel has forfeited the right to be taken seriously on this topic. Their aim is not to enlighten but to obfuscate, to the end of criminalising Israel and absolving the Islamic Republic.
For the Iraq comparison to carry moral weight, Saddam would have had to have attacked the US and the UK – and savagely. In Britain, which has a population of 70million to Israel’s nearly 10million, he would have had to have funded a terror army that slaughtered 8,400 of our people. And sponsored fanatical militants who fired 35,000 rockets at our cities, causing nearly half a million Brits to be displaced. And fired 2,500 of his own missiles directly at our cities. I was implacably opposed to the Iraq War, but if Saddam had visited such horrors on my countrymen I would have supported action against him. I’m an anti-imperialist, not a hippy.
Regionally, too, the Iraq comparison speaks to the ahistoricism of Israel’s critics. The worst thing about the Iraq War is that it was a violent pummelling of a destitute nation. War with Iran, war with Kuwait, war with its own freedom-yearning Kurdish population, war with America, the UN-enforced partition of its lands, the UN’s sanctions that caused chronic hunger and disease – Iraq was a feeble, pathetic half-nation in 2003. ‘Our’ war against it was pure moral pantomime, with well-known deadly consequences.
Iran, by contrast, is an energetic actor in the Middle East. It does pose a strategic threat. It deploys its proxies to the imperial end of extending its theocratic writ across the region. It has fought brutal proxy wars with Saudi Arabia, most notably in Yemen. And it unquestionably menaces Israel. Its missiles and its proxies’ pogroms are testament to that. Iran’s dream – openly – is to eradicate the Jewish State. Which other nation on Earth would be told to chill out in the face of such an extremist neighbour which in both word and deed had made plain its annihilationist aspirations?
The ‘invoking of the spectre of Iraq’ deserves ridicule. If people want to campaign against US or UK assistance for Israel’s war with Iran, that’s their business. I don’t want to see Western boots on the ground in Iran – let the IDF and the mullahs fight this war that Iran started. But the frothing anger with Israel for waging a supposed ‘forever war’, the feverish depiction of Israel’s leaders as modern-day Bushes or Blairs promising the world nothing but catastrophe, smacks of political infantilism. An addiction to the easy anti-war positions of the 2000s has blinded people to the moral and even civilisational questions raised by the multi-pronged Islamist effort to destroy the Jewish State.
Israel’s critics see themselves as being on the side of peace. Really? In railing against Israel for striking back against the regime that has visited extreme violence on its people, they are essentially instructing the Jewish State to live meekly alongside an existential hazard. They want to maintain a status quo ante in which the permanent threat of annihilation hangs over Israel. They see the existential endangerment of the Jews of Israel as a small price to pay for their own peace of mind. That isn’t ‘peace’ – it’s the displacement of war on to the Jews in order to save non-Jews’ arses.
It’s understandable that Iraq gave rise to a new isolationism. But it’s clear now that concern about that war has curdled into a deep and fretful cynicism where military action of any kind is viewed suspiciously. The role of the ‘Iraq spectre’ in public life is less to promote a principled opposition to Western interference in the affairs of other states than to institutionalise a politics of precaution in which every nation is encouraged to batten down the hatches lest ‘another Iraq’ occur. Between this nervous isolationism and the imperial hubris of those who smashed Iraq, there’s something else: internationalism, a support for democratic liberation everywhere. Israel has a right to defend itself against anti-Semitic tyrants, and Iranians have the right to choose who rules them – those are my uneasy positions.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
8 comments:
Let's not beat about the bush. Iran wants the total destruction of Isreal and death of all Jews. They are building thousands of missiles each month and they have almost reached the capacity to equip these missiles with nuclear warheads. If Isreal doesn't do something now, they will be fried.
What all the apologists for terrorism need to consider is if Iran is successful with Israel, what will they do next. It will be USA, so Trump has every reason to take action.
Rubbish
Too cowardly to publish your name when contributing such an 'in-depth' comment. ...??!! Total waste of space.
There are few differences between the lies told to ignite the war with Iraq and the lies told to ignite a war with Iran. The assessments of our intelligence agencies and international bodies are, as they were during the calls to invade Iraq, airily dismissed for hallucinations.
From its inception, Israel began the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living on the land given to them by the British Crown via the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The “new Israelis” used biological warfare by poisoning village wells, which was considered a war crime, but ignored. In the early 1970s, Israel supplied weapons and intelligence to aid South Africa’s apartheid movement, in return for weapons grade uranium. In 1982, thousands of Palestinians were executed in Israeli run refugee camps, and the UN General Assembly labelled it an act of genocide. In 1994, Israel supplied weapons to support the Rwanda genocide, which murdered about eight-hundred-thousand people. In 2006, Israel was accused of war crimes after deploying cluster bombs in civilian areas. Israel supplied weapons and training to South Sudanese forces during their civil war, where war crimes were rampant. Israel sold weapons to Myanmar’s military during its 2017 Rohingya genocide.
Meanwhile, British imperialism (The Crown) has been infiltrating Persia for over a century. In 1891, the Qajar dynasty sold Persia's entire tobacco industry to Britain for fifteen-thousand pounds. In 1902, they sold exclusive oil rights to Britain, who then formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1935, when Persia was renamed Iran, the name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Iranian leadership had all the appearances of being vassals to the British Crown, until 1951, when Iran elected Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister and voted to nationalize their oil.
With the help of Allen Dulles and the CIA, British Intelligence ran "Operation Ajax." Mohammad Reza Shah was taken into protective custody by British Intelligence and received cash from the CIA. After Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953, Mohammad Reza Shah was returned to Iran and put back in power, where he began forming alliances with Israeli businesses and the US military. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became, the British Petroleum Company, or BP. Mohammad Reza Shah was seen as a puppet of the Crown. The Shah became critical of Israel after their 1967 war crimes, and by the 1970s, the Shah had initiated the formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and openly planned to terminate the 1954 Consortium Agreement, which provided Western oil companies 50% ownership of Iranian oil. The Shah officially gave an ultimatum that the Consortium Agreement would be terminated in 1979. The Iranian Revolution, which was led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, (who was accused a year prior of being a British agent), and created the Islamic Republic, nullified the 1954 Consortium Agreement. This marked the end of Western control over Iran’s oil, and the beginning of Iran becoming public enemy number one in the West.
After 9/11, Iran became the final target in the US military’s long series of destabilizing governments. They are now in the crosshairs, and Reza Pahlavi, the Crown Prince of the Pahlavi dynasty, puppet to the British Crown, and a Zionist, is being sold to the people as a new leader.
“The Crown” just released its “attack dog” Israel to initiate a regime change.
Trump keeps talking about doing a deal with Iran but blatantly ignores the fact that they already had a deal to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions, but he destroyed it. It was called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and it was working! The problem was that Obama made the deal, and as we all know Trump wants no part of anything Obama did. So Trump walked away. Seven years later, Trump and his team want to talk about how dangerous Iran is. What they don’t want to talk about is how the president’s own misjudgment made the Iranian threat so much worse. Fortunately we all know that when Trump says he will make a decision in two weeks, that's his way of brushing off the whole business, Some call it the TACO strategy. So nothing will actually happen. But in the meantime he's gambling the IDF will have forced Ayotollah Khamenei onto a plane to Russia without the need for the American bunker-busting bomb. Win win. But absolutely nothing for Trump to take credit for. He will have to look somewhere else for his Nobel Peace Prize.
No, Brendan, it's actually not that complex: just as they lied us into a war with Iraq in 2003 over the threat of WMDs that they knew didn't exist using fabricated "intelligence," because even a non-nuclear Iraq with a non-compliant regime was a threat to Israeli regional dominances, so too are they lying us into a war with Iran for exactly the same reasons using exactly the same tactics.
Ultimately, if your view is that a US-sponsored Israel has a right to dominate the region free of any competition, then I suppose you are happy with all the lying, deception and violence required to make it a reality. If that is not your view, then you find all the lying, deception and violence repugnant.
Why so angry Vic?
Did you check who spiked-online is? and who funds it?
We should expect a blatant Israeli bias from them, (imo) and frankly I'm surprised this piece was republished here.
As another poster succinctly points out, this is all about regime change.
AGAIN.
Rinse and repeat.
TRUMP IS A DANGEROUS CHAP
I was supportive of Trump taking on the globalism
But reflecting, it seems his initiatives were designed to crash the markets – when he knew they would so he sold first then he knew they would recover when he changed his mind – so he bought in the crash
Guess who came out ok
And now this Iran v Israel is his war – can’t help himself for trying to be on stage
From threats he made to North Korea; Russia; UK; EU and now Iran – and every time – bullshit & jelly beans.
Take a look at Gaza to get a handle on genocide. If Hamas are under the hospital beds, send in the Israeli SAS but whether you are for or against Palestine, bombing their hospitals is not cricket.
Take a look at a map to get a handle on reality.
Meanwhile, as UAE Dubai Qatar – the hub of international air traffic (and dare I say people traffic – but that’s another story) suddenly recognise that if Uncle Sam (their best mate) drops a big bomb on the Iran nuke facility, the clouds of dust and “wot have they done to the rain” (1) will immediately wreck their capitalist dream. No throughway for all air passengers.
Game set and match.
There will be no big bomb and that big clown Trump will once again be exposed as a dangerous narcissist – probably more dangerous than dementia Biden
Marianne Faithfull What have they done to the Rain - Penned as it was pending big bombs by Uncle sam - Cold War days.
Reoccurring theme? Uncle Sam.
As for Trump sorting Russia Ukraine? Pig will fly.
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