This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

As everything that President Donald Trump says seems to be the opposite of the truth, it comes as no surprise that his jibe about Sir Keir Starmer not being in the mould of Winston Churchill came just as Starmer was for once showing some Churchillian resolve in opposition to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

In terms of moral depravity and deliberate inhumanity, the ongoing attack on Iran may soon rival the destruction of Gaza and its people as the war crime of the century. As with Gaza, the true objective is not to eliminate a toxic leadership, but to batter a whole society into submission.

In this scenario, Iran is to be removed as a player from the geopolitical map of the Middle East by triggering state collapse and national fragmentation. Only the most partisan or naive will be persuaded by feel-good talk from the US and Israel about the goal of this merciless air campaign being to free the Iranian people from their theocratic chains. Rejecting such hypocrisy, the US Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth, boasted on Wednesday that the US was winning the war “decisively, devastatingly and without mercy”.

As occurred so often in Gaza, the grim meaning of this approach was made appallingly clear by the long line of coffins of the 175 children and staff killed by an air strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab in southern Iran. The US has yet to accept blame, but analysis by The New York Times suggests it was hit during US strikes on a nearby naval base.

At some point in this conflict, an armchair pundit will come up with the hackneyed saying often misattributed to the great French diplomat Talleyrand, that what we are seeing is “worse than a crime, it is a mistake”. But such cheap cynicism and pretended realpolitik is entirely incorrect: political mistakes are often forgiven or forgotten, but not moral failings on matters of life and death. Tony Blair’s reputation was forever tainted in the eyes of the public by his decision to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Starmer and his Government were lastingly damaged by their complicity in the horrors of the Gaza war.

But there is a further reason why the UK Government should distance itself from the war. For a long time, I was wary of describing the Trump administration as fascist because fascism means for many the violent, populist, nationalist and despotic version espoused by Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in the 1930s. During his first term in the White House, Trump belonged rather to a category of semi-fascist leaders which includes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan. Trump started no wars during this period, and denounced his predecessors for entangling America in “forever wars”.

It is only in his second term that the Trump administration has entered full 1930s fascist mode. He and his weird lieutenants express an open relish for violence and war. Venezuelan seamen clinging to the wreckage of their boat are described as a menace to the US and summarily killed. An Iranian warship is torpedoed in international waters and sunk with 87 sailors dead. Trump talks openly of annexing Greenland or, half-jokingly, of making Canada the 51st American state. The arbitrary use of extreme violence and megalomania are two characteristics of the full fascist leadership. First Trump orders the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then demands a role in deciding his successor.

Speculation about the motives for Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in starting the war and their possible endgame is over-sophisticated. Israel and the US believed Iran to be low-hanging strategic fruit, lacking allies and weakened by Israel’s 12-day war against it last year. Its economy is collapsing under the weight of sanctions which helped provoke the bloodily suppressed anti-government street protests in January. The US and Israel attacked now because they think they can win.

The much-debated nature of their endgame is not really a mystery. It has nothing to do with the future happiness and prosperity of 92 million Iranians. The goal is not different from that of past conquerors in the region, from the Egyptian pharaohs 3,000 years ago to the British and French takeover of much of the Middle East after the First World War. Many of these hegemonic rulers claimed to be acting in the interests of its inhabitants, but all were prepared to destroy, displace and kill any who resisted their rule.

Israel is more honest about its motives than the US. “If we can have a coup, great,” the Iran expert at Tel Aviv’s National Institute for National Security Studies, Danny Citrinowicz, told the Financial Times in summarising the Israeli government’s attitude. “If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future… [or] the stability of Iran.”

For the first time Israel has a US administration willing to go to war side by side with it. Insofar as they differ, it is the Israeli objectives that tend to be given priority because of Trumpian ignorance and vagueness. The US administration bristles with super-Zionist sympathisers.

Arab states were aghast in February when the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked if he agreed with a Biblical verse saying Israel had the right to the territory between the Nile and Euphrates rivers, replied: “It would be fine if it took it all.”

Iran will scarcely be the last Israeli target in the region. The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett recently said: “A new Turkish threat is emerging. We must act in different ways, but simultaneously against the threat from Tehran and the hostility from Ankara.”

Have the US and Israel got their political and military sums right? Now almost defenceless against US and Israeli air attack, destruction in Iran will be massive. Nevertheless, the ideological glue holding together core supporters of the regime is Shiaism, with its emphasis on endurance and martyrdom in defence of the faith. They are unlikely to compromise or capitulate. Militarily outmatched, they have still managed to provoke chaos among the Arab oil states of the Gulf that may tip the world into a global economic crisis.

The greatest restraint on Trump fighting a long war is its unpopularity among US voters. A YouGov poll this week shows 48 per cent opposing the war and 37 per cent supporting it.

Whatever the outcome of the war, it is revealing about the real balance of power in the world. Russia and China, supposedly great powers, have done nothing to help their ally Iran. The EU and Nato states, though unhappy at US and Israeli actions, have – with a few notable exceptions like Spain – done nothing to oppose it. Even Starmer’s unaccustomed stand on principle may have been the result of cabinet pressure on him not to cave in to Trump.

In an era of escalating violence and war that feels unnervingly like the 1930s, a Churchillian refusal to appease an increasingly erratic and bellicose Trump is essential.

Manipulation of the Kurds in US interests, followed by their later betrayal when convenient for Washington, is a disgracefully recurrent feature of Middle East politics. Today it may be happening all over again as the CIA foment an uprising by the nine million Iranian Kurds to destabilise the Iranian government during the present war.

Iranian Kurdish paramilitaries based in Iraqi Kurdistan are eager to cross the border and advance under the cover of US and Israeli air strikes. Israel has reportedly already been clearing the way by attacking Iranian police stations along the Iran-Iraq border. Trump spoke on Tuesday with the president of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, Mustafa Hijri, according to senior Iranian Kurdish officials. Their forces are expected to launch a ground operation in western Iran in the next few days.

I have eyewitness experience of US use and abuse of the Kurds in Iraq and Syria stretching back many years. My first contact with the politics of the Middle East came when the Iraqi Kurds, who had been fighting the government in Baghdad for years, were summarily abandoned by the Shah of Iran and the US in 1975.

Betrayal was organised by US national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who arranged for the Shah to do a deal with Iraq and cut off aid to the Kurds who fled in their thousands through the mountains to Iran. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi troops moved in. I helped set up a small society in the UK which sought to publicise atrocities being committed against the Kurds.

Years later, I spent much time in the Kurdish-held enclave in Syria where the Syrian Kurds were providing the ground troops for the US air offensive against Isis, which seized much of north-east Syria in 2014. The Kurds lost 10,000 dead in the fighting over the following 12 years. But once Isis had been destroyed and Bashar al-Assad overthrown and replaced by a pro-US government in Syria, the betrayal was swift and complete. Once again, the roads are crowded with terrified, fleeing Kurds trying to escape the government advance.

Authoritative reports from the US say that the Trump administration is in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups about supplying them with weapons and military support. Doubtless, they can advance behind US and Israeli air strikes, but just as surely this military sideshow will end once again with Kurds abandoned by their opportunist US allies.

Given that Israel kicked off its wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2023 and against Iran in 2025 with devastating assassinations of enemy leaders, it is astonishing that they succeeded in killing Khamenei and a clutch of other Iranian security chiefs in exactly the same manner.

Surely, Iranian security should have understood that established routines and patterns of movement were most likely known to the CIA and Mossad. Holding a meeting of senior commanders in a predictable place like the Ayatollah’s compound in Tehran was predictably suicidal. Yet that was exactly what Iran’s Supreme National Security Council did last Saturday, without even taking the precaution of using an underground bunker. Is this evidence of a Shia yearning for martyrdom in defence of the faith, following in the footsteps of Imam Hussein and Hazrat Abbas, the martyred founders of Shia Islam?

In the case of Khamenei this explanation might well be correct. He had reportedly told his inner circle that he preferred martyrdom to going into hiding. But this does not explain why so many military and security chiefs were also having their meeting in the leader’s compound. Khamenei was in a separate building in another part of the compound and had asked to be briefed about the outcome of the meeting, which was still going when the missiles struck.

I wonder if the 86-year-old Khamenei, like Joe Biden during his final years in office, had somewhat lost touch with reality, but had all the stubbornness of the very old – and insisted that the national security meeting take place where it fatally did? 

This is the best-informed and most nuanced piece I have read about the political landscape inside Iran after the Khamenei’s assassination.

Trump has a dangerous new red line for his attack dogs

Starmer is facing a dangerous new rebellion. It could actually bring him down

Anna Williamson: Cheating isn’t as bad as you think

The Bronx real estate hustler who proves Trump is the boss from hell

© iNews