The House That Pretended Not to See the Fire |
Imagine a house in which smoke rises steadily from the cellar. The smell is unmistakable. The floorboards begin to grow warm beneath the feet. A few occupants, uneasy at the creeping haze, point out that something below may be burning.
But the master of the house insists that no such conclusion can yet be drawn. The smoke must first be properly investigated. Perhaps the flames have been exaggerated. Perhaps someone else started the fire. Perhaps, above all, any attempt to extinguish it might violate the house rules.
Meanwhile those gathered comfortably in the drawing room argue over who should apologise for mentioning the smoke in the first place.
This, in essence, is the present condition of Britain’s debate about Iran.
The Islamic Republic – a regime whose hostility to the West is neither subtle nor newly discovered – has spent decades exporting terror, cultivating militias and financing ideological warfare far beyond its borders. Its agents intimidate dissidents abroad. Its proxies destabilise entire regions. Its leaders regularly indulge in theatrical threats against Israel.
Yet when Israel and the United States confront this regime, a peculiar spectacle unfolds in Westminster and across large parts of the British Left.
Suddenly Tehran is no longer the arsonist. It becomes the aggrieved party.
We are told that Israel has “dragged” the United States into war. Dragged, as though Washington were some helpless spectator hauled unwillingly into someone else’s quarrel. The argument would be impressive for its imagination were it not so brazenly dishonest.
To accept it one must forget several inconvenient facts. One must overlook the Islamic Republic’s decades-long sponsorship of militant proxies across the Middle East. One must disregard the global reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. One must pretend that the regime’s hostility toward Israel and the West is merely rhetorical excess rather than a central organising principle of the state itself.
In short, one must suspend reality.
The legal argument deployed by critics is equally revealing. We are told with solemn authority that the war is “unlawful”, that the proper procedures of international diplomacy were not observed, that no mandate was secured.
One wonders what tribunal these commentators believe governs the conduct of revolutionary theocracies.
The Islamic Republic did not spend four decades constructing a network of militias and proxies because it was committed to the orderly arbitration of international disputes. It did so because it believes itself engaged in a permanent ideological struggle with the West.
And yet Britain’s political class continues to behave as though this confrontation were a regrettable misunderstanding.
There is something remarkable about the scale of the self-deception. Faced with one of the most openly hostile regimes on the planet, the British government manages to sound both indignant and paralysed at once. It condemns Tehran’s behaviour while insisting that confronting it too firmly would be imprudent, provocative or perhaps insufficiently diplomatic.
The Left, for its part, has managed an even more depressing transformation. A movement once animated by the language of liberty and solidarity with the oppressed now finds itself offering indulgence to a regime that imprisons feminists, executes dissidents and governs through clerical absolutism.
The explanation is not difficult to locate. For many activists, hostility to the West has become such a powerful instinct that it overrides all other considerations. If the ayatollahs oppose Washington or Jerusalem, then they must somehow represent resistance.
Thus the Islamic Republic – a theocratic state whose social codes belong to another century – acquires admirers among those who claim to champion progress.
It is a moral inversion so striking that one scarcely knows whether to laugh or despair.
What remains beyond dispute is this: Israel did not drag the United States into war with Iran. Iran spent forty-five years constructing the ideological, military and political machinery that made such a confrontation inevitable.
The real scandal is not that Tehran has behaved as it always does.
It is that Britain still seems astonished when the fire it has spent years pretending not to see finally reaches the floorboards.