The Iran delusion

The west believes fanatics can be appeased. Israel knows better

Neville Chamberlain brandishes the Munich Agreement, 1938

This is an expanded version of my column in yesterday’s Times of London (£).

In June 2013, I took part in an edition of BBC TV’s Question Time in front of a studio audience at London’s County Hall, headquarters of the Mayor of London — who was then one Boris Johnson. 

You can watch the whole episode here. At around 29 minutes in, there was a question about arming the Syrian rebels against President Bashar Assad (the issue at that time). At around 35.48 minutes in, I delivered my answer.

I suggested that this was a war in which there were no good options. An axis composed of Assad, Iran and the Soviet Union was arrayed against the Syrian rebels, al Qaeda, and the Islamists. I said:

If the Islamists — the rebels, al Qaeda — win in Syria, nobody should be under any illusion that there will be human rights and democracy; it will be awful for the Syrians and it will be awful for us. But no-one should be under any illusion also that if Assad remains it will be terrible for his people, whom he has butchered in such large number, but also terrible for us because Syria … is the pawn of Iran. 

And this is the bigger game here… I believe the key to this, if we are to do anything, is that we should have our eye fixed on where our interests lie. And where the west’s interests lie is in neutralising Iran. We have allowed Iran over many years, through this farce of talking to people who cannot be talked to, to continue with its pursuit of a nuclear bomb with which it intends, it says, to commit genocide against Israel — a state (Iran) which has declared for the past 25 years war against us. That is the problem.

A section of the audience started to boo and protest. So I pointed at them and said, over the growing tumult:

That’s the problem — the defeatism of the British people against a clear threat to this country’s interests.

At this point, Boris said:

Melanie, I was with you all the way until you said we’ve got to neutralise Iran.

The audience erupted in applause at his words and jeered at me. So I leapt in again and said to the audience:

You laugh! You laugh! “Neutralise Iran” — the British audience laughs! How trivial of you! How incredibly ignorant of you! Do you not understand what a threat that country is to us? No you don’t!  

“Paranoia!” shouted a member of the audience. Another asked why it was irrational to negotiate with Iran. To which I replied, to renewed uproar and disbelief:

Because Iran is currently run by people who believe, as a matter of religious belief, that if they bring about the apocalypse, if they bring about literally the end of the world, they will bring to earth the Shia messiah. That’s the people you’re dealing with.

More incredulity and jeering.

Later in the show, Boris said that as far as he was aware Iran was not working on developing nuclear weapons. Thus Britain’s future foreign secretary and prime minister appeared to think that the concerns being expressed at the time by western governments and the International Atomic Energy Authority, which suspected Iran was concealing precisely that  — as was later shown to be the case  — were to be dismissed as having no substance whatever.

What I said on that show was true, and we are living through the demonstration of that truth today. The uproar in the BBC studio was brought to an end, but the denialism continues.

Indeed, one astonishing aspect of the current madness over events in the Middle East is the refusal by so many to acknowledge the nature and extent of the threat by Iran.

Many appear to believe that, ever since the October 7 pogrom, the crisis has consisted of a war by Israel against Hamas in Gaza, with the underlying issue being Israel’s conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Even today, well-meaning but blinkered folk are still touting the “two-state solution” as the way of ending the conflict. 

So the eruption into their consciousness of the war in Lebanon has left such people disorientated and confused. For what they’ve never appreciated is that October 7 was the starting gun for Iran’s final war of extermination against Israel as a precursor to the regime’s intended destruction of the west.