UK: Will Keir Starmer drag us into a war with Iran?

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On Saturday, Israel initiated a war of aggression against Iran, launching a series of attacks against Iranian nuclear facilities and personnel.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, justified the strikes by saying Iran “could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time” if not stopped.

This is a script that the Israeli prime minister has been rehearsing for decades.

In 1996, he said Iran was getting “extremely close” to developing nuclear weapons. In 2012, he claimed Iran might soon be “a few weeks” away from its first bomb. In 2015, he declared Iran was within touching distance of having “an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs”.

Netanyahu was wrong then, but is he right now?

US national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate committee last month that the US intelligence community had assessed Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.

There is currently no evidence that Iran has enriched uranium to 90 percent, which is weapons grade, though it has accelerated enrichment to 60 percent, which is unique for a state without nuclear weapons.

Remarkably, US president Donald Trump has decided to disregard his own country’s intelligence community and side with Netanyahu. “I don’t care what she said”, he said in response to Gabbard’s assessment. “I think they were very close to having one”.

Around 30 US air force refuelling and military transport aircraft have now been dispatched towards the Middle East, with some of them taking up strategic positions in European countries including Britain.

The UK government has also dispatched military aircraft to the region. Defence secretary John Healey said on Tuesday that “military assets including… Typhoon jets have begun arriving – the first wave has already arrived and the rest will follow in the coming days”.

This operational response, according to Healey, “is to protect our personnel, to reassure our partners and to reinforce the urgent need for de-escalation”.

But the situation is escalating rapidly, and Netanyahu may finally be achieving his life goal of dragging the US – and, possibly by extension, Britain – into a wider war on Iran.

Indeed, after claiming that the US government had not been involved in the strikes on Iran, Trump is now boasting that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and demanding “unconditional surrender” from Tehran.

These threats could be followed up with the deployment of US B-2 bombers to strike Iran – the only aircraft capable of carrying the 30,000lb bombs that could penetrate the mountain shielding Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment facility.

Six B-2s were stationed at the Diego Garcia airbase, a British Ministry of Defence facility leased to the US and only 3,200 miles away from Fordow, as recently as May.

If history teaches us anything, a US-led war on Iran would likely be supported by Britain. The ball, terrifyingly, is now in Trump’s hands.

Source: declassifieduk.org