Melanie Phillips: Wimps and warriors

The war against Iran is having a most clarifying effect. It’s shining a light on those who are prepared to stand with civilisation against barbarism and flushing out those who are not.

The usual suspects — those who hate Israel, despise America and stick pins into effigies of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are willing Iran to win, or more to the point, willing Trump and Netanyahu to lose.

Those who get news of the war only from mainstream media outlets in America and Britain have little idea of what’s actually happening.

Many have no idea that throughout the years, hundreds of American soldiers were killed by Iranian proxies in Iraq and in repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. bases. They are ignorant of the thousands of missiles amassed by Hezbollah, which is currently firing hundreds of them at Israeli citizens from Lebanon every day.

All they know from media outlets like The New York Times or the BBC is that the war was always going to be a disaster, it’s becoming a quagmire, it’s going to destroy the world’s economy, Trump is incompetent, he hasn’t got a strategy, and Iran is winning.

In an article on Unherd, Sohrab Ahmari has complained that Trump betrayed his promise as a “war-weary populist” to become “a chaos agent,” failing to display a proper “aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction”.

To characterise this war as “wanton bloodshed and destruction” is not only wantonly to dismiss Iran’s bloody record and the mortal threat it has increasingly posed to America, Israel and the West. It also grossly misrepresents as “chaos” the astoundingly precise, targeted, steady destruction of Iran’s entire military machine and apparatus of internal repression.

By the start of this week, Iranian ballistic-missile and drone launches had fallen by more than 90 per cent and 75 per cent respectively.

Much of Iran’s regular navy is lying at the bottom of the sea, while its fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defenses have been largely obliterated so that America’s non-stealth B-1 bombers are generally flying unimpeded over Iranian airspace.

Yes, Iran’s extortion racket in the Straits of Hormuz is causing a major problem. But that can be addressed by eliminating Iran’s ability to hit shipping.

And if the regime is totally defanged in accordance with the aims of this war, the oil weapon at this infamous maritime choke-point won’t be used ever again — a hitherto unthinkable boon that would be very much worth the short-term pain.

As for Tehran’s gambit of bombing the Gulf states to make them pressurise Trump to end the war, that’s spectacularly blown up in its face. The Gulfies are so appalled by the Iranian attacks that they are putting huge pressure on Trump to finish the job of bringing the regime down.

None of this is to be at all Pollyanna-ish about the war. This week, Israel was still being barraged by missiles, including illegal cluster munitions, as a result of which Iran succeeded in murdering at least two Israelis and four West Bank Arabs. And obviously, there’s no telling how this war will end.

But it has demonstrated with savage clarity the cowardice of Britain and Europe, which have refused to join this fight against one of the great evils of the world. Trump’s blunt language may not be to everyone’s taste, but he is entirely correct to be furious at their response.

Iran is a menace not just to Israel and America, but to Europe and the rest of the world. As the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, it has left a bloody trail of innocent victims and has been poised to achieve a nuclear-weapons arsenal.

Yet Starmer has repeatedly and wrongly declared that the war is illegal under international law, a claim repeated by the Europeans. The European Union’s chief foreign-policy officer, Kaja Kallas, stated: “Iran is not our war.”

But Britain and Europe, which won’t lift a finger to fight this threat to civilisation, rely parasitically on the United States to defend them against all such dangers.

Britain was once a byword for martial grit, loyalty to allies and a bloody-minded refusal to kowtow to tyranny. Trump, who has sentimental ties to Britain, rightly declared that Starmer is “no Winston Churchill”.

But the problem isn’t just that Keir Starmer, a fanatical zealot for international law, is unfortunately Britain’s current prime minister.
Deeper trends have made Britain increasingly irrelevant on the world stage. Its refusal to join the war has camouflaged the embarrassing truth that it doesn’t have warships to send. For decades, it has been steadily emasculating its defenses to feed the voracious and limitless welfare state.

At the same time, Britain has been genuflecting to its increasingly assertive and politically powerful Muslim community, giving into its demands that British society adapts to Islamic precepts in accordance with the Islamist agenda of infiltrating, intimidating and conquering the West. The country is unable to defend itself because it no longer even acknowledges its own historic identity.

However, America, which has been gazing in dismay at the sad decline of the mothership of liberty across the Atlantic, has been having its own clarifying moment during this war.

Joe Kent just resigned as director of the US National Counterterrorism Centre in protest against the war. He falsely claimed that Washington attacked Iran “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Not only did he further claim that Israel had drawn America into the 2003 Iraq war, even though Israel had actually warned the United States against that campaign. He also claimed that his wife had died “in a war manufactured by Israel,” whereas in fact she had been murdered in 2019 by an Islamic State suicide bomber in America’s war to destroy ISIS.

In other words, Kent outed himself as a profound antisemite — in keeping with his association with the poisonous, Jew-hating MAGA faction led by Tucker Carlson.

It’s a relief that Trump has finally started to speak against this faction. However, US Vice President JD Vance has once again dodged the elephant in the room.

Speaking about Kent’s resignation, Vance said it was fine to disagree, but those working for the Trump administration had to go along with whatever the president decided to do. So it was right for Kent to resign.

This was a wholly inadequate response. What Vance should have said was that Kent’s comments were antisemitic and totally unacceptable, whether made by someone in or out of government office.

Just as he had previously done with antisemitic comments made by Carlson and the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Vance was again presenting the “big tent” approach for welcoming disagreement over different opinions.

But Jew-hatred can never be acceptable as a mere difference of opinion. It is utterly unacceptable and should be given no house-room in a tent of any size.

If Trump and Vance don’t clearly repudiate and shun the Carlson faction, the Republican Party will be damaged. As a result, America may be thrown to the wolves of a Democratic party in thrall to anti-American, anti-West, anti-white racists, Islamists, antisemites and other cultish ideologues.

The war has now brought this internal threat out into the open. We can all see from Kent’s words that this poison has infected the heart of the Trump administration.

Defeating Iran will transform the whole world for the better and lead to new alliances that support rather than menace civilisation.

If America doesn’t see this through, however, and the butchers of Tehran survive to fight another day, the United States will be catastrophically weakened, and the axis of evil comprising Russia, China and North Korea will accordingly be immeasurably strengthened.

In other words, Trump is playing double or quits — and the hearts of the rest of us are in our mouths.

In America, the war is sorting out the wimps from the warriors, realists from the fantasists and people of integrity from the morally depraved. But for Britain and Europe, the war is increasingly demonstrating that they are simply over.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author - you can follow her work on her website HERE