Remember the blood and lies of Iraq? We can't do it again with Iran

The Herald Scotland

4 hours ago

My daughter picked up her phone to call a cab, scrolled, and said "America has bombed Iran". There was a moment of collective horror, a few whispered "Jesus Christs", "oh no" and "f**ks".
The mood quickly became strange, through. It wasn't really fear or anger, more this weight of powerlessness pressing down on us all. What could we – mere people, mere citizens – do any more?
A friend nailed it: 'We're trapped on a planet with three lunatics who are going to kill us all.' He meant Trump, Putin and Netanyahu.
The older the folk, the greater the sense of helplessness. Back in 2003, I was 33. At the time, that age felt very adult. Looking back, I realise how young and naive I was.
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, I wrote investigation after investigation detailing the lies which the governments of Tony Blair and George Bush were spinning to justify their illegal war.
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There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blair, Bush and their bloody-handed sidekicks knew that. They wanted war. They'd the taste of blood in their mouths.
I turned all those investigations into a damn book thinking, like a fool, it might matter. I marched with one million other people, thinking that might matter. Still the war came.
Iraq destroyed Britain and America. Our governments committed a monstrous sin based on deliberate lies, killed mountains of fellow human beings, and unleashed hell across the Middle East.
No Iraq, no Islamic State. Blair brought terror to British streets. The chaos in the Middle East created millions of refugees, whose arrival in Europe was used to crowbar our societies apart. We threw trillions away on a meaningless, pointless bloodbath.
Iraq was the first step towards the mass rejection of politics we see today. If our governments could lie to us on such an issue – a matter of life, death and morality – then how could we trust them on anything?
So I wasn't much surprised on Saturday night. If Iraq could happen in the face of all those warnings, all that protest, then of course Iran could be bombed. Indeed, the bombing felt inevitable.
Like Iraq, Iran is a brutal regime, whose leaders should be in The Hague. Yet like Iraq, the cruelties which leaders have inflicted on their people isn't the casus belli for Iran.
The reasons we – the powerless citizenry – are given as a justification is, once again, weapons of mass destruction.
Are we to be fools twice over? Iraqi WMDs was a lie. There's no reason to believe anything western governments or their intelligence services say when it comes to Iran and its nuclear programme.
It's the ultimate case of the boy who cried wolf. Iran could have an atom bomb. But how could anyone trust the people who sit in Washington and London?
However, the notion that Iran has such weapons doesn't need much to knock it down. In March, Trump's national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard said: 'Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.'
At Trump's command, she cravenly changed her mind. There have been claims that Iran was building a bomb since 1979 when the Shah was overthrown. In 1984, West German intelligence claimed Iran's production of a bomb was 'entering its final stages'.
Diplomatic talks with Iran on nuclear weapons were ongoing, until Israel's government persuaded Trump to start bombing. There were five rounds of talks. Israel unleashed its military campaign two days before the sixth round of negotiations. America destroyed any hope of diplomacy.
Israel's government, under the leadership of Netanyahu, is out of control. Indeed, Britain and America, and other western nations, should question their relationship with Israel's current government given the horror it has unleashed in Gaza.
We should note, with grave solemnity, that last November, a UN special committee said Israeli government policies and practices in Gaza were 'consistent with the characteristics of genocide'.
We're now at the stage where America's actions risk spreading the Middle East conflict. If America is sucked in deeper, then it's inevitable that Britain will be dragged in deeper too, traipsing behind our US masters.
That cannot happen. Any attempt by Keir Starmer to join America and Israel must be subjected to a vote in Parliament, and MPs put under such pressure by constituents that Labour is stopped in its tracks.
Certainly, that's what every single person at that Saturday night house party in Glasgow believed.
I kept my cynicism to myself, however. How could I believe protest might work when I'd seen Iraq happen? Yet, why destroy the last vestige of hope among the young, in the dying moments of a night of good cheer and friendship?
The huge anti-war protest in London in 2003 (Image: Getty)
Those at the party, older than me, felt the same. As I kissed a dear friend in her eighties goodnight, I suggested we should take some solace in the belief persisting among the young that protest could change a government's mind. 'At least they haven't given up hope,' I said.
'My generation felt like that during Vietnam,' she replied.
Her words sent me tumbling back through time, to when I was five, sitting in front of a black and white TV playing with my toys while my parents watched Saigon fall.
I saw something then, which has stayed with me forever: a dead and disembowelled child being carried over the heads of a group of Vietnamese men through a burning wasteland of rubble.
My friend kissed me in return and said: 'It just keeps going; it never ends. The horror is: we're powerless to stop it. Until we're not powerless any more, of course. But that takes the kind of courage on behalf of ordinary people which I've not seen in my lifetime.'
That was wisdom. That was hope.
Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer at Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.