It is heartening to see the lefties out marching in defence of mullahs and their enlightened rule of Iran. The Stop the War Coalition has been organising protests the length and breadth of the country, demanding ‘Hands off Iran’. It is harder for the marchers to identify specifically with their cause than it is when they’re marching about Palestine: Iranians don’t wear keffiyehs. Perhaps they should take on their marches an intricately woven carpet or some uranium-235. Or maybe design some sort of badge that can be cheaply manufactured and somehow symbolises the country – I would suggest the image of a crane with a homosexual dangling at the end of it.
Out there in the moronosphere, opposition to everything the West does grows by the week: it is Peak Corbyn – all countries which we loathe are to be defended, all countries which we like to be vilified, but especially Israel. Always Israel. The only countries which come even close to Israel in levels of fascist mendacity are the USA and of course the UK. Meanwhile, whereas once the marchers contented themselves with demanding an end to military action, now they are identifying with the regimes under attack and making treasonous raids upon our own military infrastructure. All the time telling us that the biggest threat to peace in the UK is something called ‘the far right’.
I have no objection at all to dropping lots of bombs on Iran. As has been said before, it is a foul authoritarian country that has continually sponsored terrorism against democratic governments, and its aspiration to construct some sort of primitive nuclear bomb must be forestalled. Even now I can hear the riposte from the cretinati: ‘We’ve got nuclear weapons, why shouldn’t they have them?’ A point of view so devoid of rationality that it is pointless even to engage.
So, I reckon, keep the bombs a-coming until we are certain that their dreams of Armageddon are put back by 30 years or so and their scientists and centrifuges buried deep beneath billions of tons of rubble. Taking out Iran’s nukes is a precise, practical and attainable aspiration on the part of the West and Israel, just as taking back the Falklands was a precise, practical and attainable aspiration. And just as carpet-bombing Vietnam in order to persuade them of the benefits of capitalism as opposed to communism was none of those things – much like the Iraq War, once we had discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction lying around and we had been lied to by our governments.
That is one reason I wouldn’t support an attempt at ‘regime change’ in Iran. It would be an undertaking of enormous expense in terms of lives and money and, more importantly, it would not work. It could provoke the Iranians to hunker down with their current administration and if regime change were to occur, it would almost certainly be for the worse. In short, Iran would be left in the hands of a group of people whose animosity towards Israel and the West would be greater. Those cranes for hanging homosexuals would probably increase in number.
Taking out Iran’s nukes is a precise, practical and attainable aspiration on the part of the West
I had hoped that the liberal evangelistic approach to foreign policy might have been extinguished entirely as a consequence of its hideous failures in the past quarter of a century, but it is still with us. The notion that an entire people can be bombed into becoming agreeable Jeffersonian Democrats still lingers. It is given succour by western TV interviews with nice, well-educated, middle-class people in Tehran – career women who hate the niqab, university professors who wish for freedom of speech, clamorous students who want freedom and western consumer durables. The problem is that these people represent about 3 per cent of Iran’s population, just as those freedom-loving liberals in Kabul or Baghdad represented a similar fraction of their own country’s population.
The overwhelming majority in every case beg to differ. These are the people who exist scarcely above subsistence level, have huge families and little education and will cleave to whoever shouts the name of Allah with the most bloodied vigour. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was indeed a mass uprising, partly provoked by our own highly dubious meddling in the affairs of that country. The vast majority of Iranians do not want to be western, considering us debauched and godless (and they are not entirely wrong about that). Regime change would be for the worse, just as it was in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cambodia. I thought we understood that now.
If Iraq didn’t clear the sinuses of the congealed phlegm of liberal evangelism, then those Arab Springs should certainly have done so. One by one, the BBC cameras and fawning correspondents traipsed from Tripoli to Cairo via Tunis over to Sanaa and back to Rabat and, most dangerously, Riyadh. They want freedom! And democracy!
What they got instead was usually the Muslim Brotherhood. In not one country where regime change actually took place did it turn out to be for the better, unless your conception of ‘better’ means a more authoritarian and fundamentalist administration. Luckily they got nowhere near regime change in Saudi Arabia, or we would have lost a valuable ally and be faced with a comparatively rich country in the grip of the mentalist Wahabis and Salafists who yearn for our destruction with the same misplaced zeal that they yearn for virgin totty. The correspondents who believed that from those various protests in each country would spring forth an amenable politician, a sort of Menzies Campbell with a tea towel on his head, were sadly mistaken.
It seems to be a vault of imagination too far for many in the West that we live in an imperfect world and that not everybody in it believes in the same things we do. But that’s the only truth worth knowing. De-nuke the mullahs and then let them get on with it until, one day, their population has had enough.
Comments