“I am a friend of the right, of wrong I am not a friend. … I am not hot-tempered. … What a man does or performs, according to his ability, by that I become satisfied with him. May Ahuramazda protect this country from a (hostile) army, from famine, from the Lie!” Darius (1) ‘the Great’ (422–486 BC)
The terrible irony of modern Iran is that it is a nation built on an amazing and rich history of tremendous power, art, architecture and culture now run by a thuggish, murderous and simplistic religious dogma.
The Iranian regime – we don’t call it a government because to do so would be to misdescribe the bizarre and opaque way myriad factions in their system work – wants to hurt you. That’s the simple truth
The Iranian theocracy is as anti-Western today as it was when the Islamic Revolution happened forty or more years ago and it wants to do anything it can to disrupt or end your life. Unless you are a rabid Islamist and then, maybe, you are an expendable ally
The French have announced that the cyber-attack on their supermarket refrigerators which spoiled hundreds of thousands of Euro’s worth of food originated from a wing of the IRGC.
To understand the Iranian regime it is important to understand the role the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps plays within it. I’m making no more comparison than structural when I say you couldn’t be part of the German government in the 1930’s without being a Nazi, or the Syrian or Iraqi governments without being in the Ba’ath party.
Not everyone, who doesn’t have a beard and a head dress, in the Iranian system is a member or holds a rank in the IRGC but it’s tentacles have spread from “defenders of the revolution” to ‘defending the revolutionary government’ to being the revolutionary government.
These people try to kill anyone that they believe threatens that reality and have done for the last nearly fifty years. It is year zero for existential threat for the IRGC. And now they feel vindicated in their paranoia because the US under Donald Trump and Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu do want to destroy them. Indeed in once sense have already wiped out a whole generation of the Iranian regime, and yet it survives.
It has next to no popular support in Iran, but always had the card to play to the beleaguered Iranian people that it was the bastion against Western interference in Persia. Why does that work? Because for many years the West interfered in Persia, let’s not deny it.
The irony is when the hammer fell, in a move that has spectacularly back fired on Donal Trump and Pete Hegseth, Keir Starmer and indeed Emmanuel Macron (remember the fridges) thought not being ‘involved’ would make a difference. It did not. Not a jot.
In the eyes of the IRGC everyone in the West is ‘involved’ and it would happily attack, disrupt or kill anybody in the haram West if the opportunity makes itself available. It is hard to over emphasise how much work the IRGC makes for MI5.
Members of the current government have sought once again, as Starmer did at the time, to imply the Conservatives and Kemi Badenoch was ‘itching to have a war with Iran’ or was ‘catastrophically gung-ho’ when what she actually did was say we should support the US using our bases, and 48 hours later Starmer did. Our allies and assets were attacked anyway.
Iran has experienced a very violent and unwanted version of a new leader coming in with a whole new team, and like some of the Iranian survivalist Islamists Andy Burnham is not, by his own admission, a foreign policy specialist.
The new powers in Tehran are not the cadre we faced when I spent time in our Foreign Office, where all desire to ‘pop a missile through the window of their nuclear bunkers’ was strongly discouraged as impractical and ill judged. So it has turned out. Israel was never able to take the option. Only the mighty US had the weapons that might bust the bunkers. In the end they didn’t bust enough. Iran right now, still has a practical strangle hold on the Hormuz Strait and is laughing at a mid-term weakened Trump.
The Iranian regime only had to survive to win. The sight of deluded pro-Palestinian left wingers choosing to support the ayatollahs over America – however weak and silly their President might now be – was nauseating.
Proscribing the IRGC as many have clamoured for is not actually the solution too many think it is. We still have diplomatic relations with Tehran, as we do with Russia and China. There are, and have been, excellent reasons for continuing that. It would be symbolic at best to do so. Proscribing Palestine Action does make sense so they can’t raise money in the UK or happily excuse the damage to a police woman’s spine because ‘Gaza’ ?! That won’t actually work with the IRGC. However The Islamic revolution that ate millions of it’s own children in its quest for a medieval man-centric theocratic thuggery are not our friends and we should confront them in every practical way we can.
Trump’s misadventure that we are all paying for doesn’t change that reality. The aim was correct, the method has proved inadequate. Quite why Pete Hegseth, who is in real trouble right now, thought it would be a ‘walk in the park’ remains a mystery – as I was told how difficult forcing regime change would be, three years before.
However, profoundly wishing the regime would collapse, wanting that, aiming for that and working towards it, is a noble cause. Any reader of Ben Mcintyre’s excellent new book Redwood will see how long and how bizarrely we have engaged with it.
The Tories didn’t ‘want a war’. They weren’t ‘itching to have’ a war. They did however know, from experience, that if one was coming with the Iranian regime, you’d better win it.
Iran under the Islamic revolution will continue, as Churchill put it to ‘pester, nag and bite’ and not one of those involved in its survival deserves our empathy, sympathy or understanding.
It’s an unpopular message; it just happens to be true.