HITCHENS: Why does the West give Israel free rein to smash Iran?

Everywhere in the media and politics people are adopting stern expressions and pious voices about the various wars we now confront. But their moralising just does not make sense.

For instance, it is pretty much agreed by everyone (except the Kremlin) that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wicked and blatant breach of international law. But when Israel launched huge bombing raids against Iran, killing untold numbers of civilians and smashing densely populated cities, the silence from those in the West who have angrily condemned Russia for years was so dense you could have cut it into cubes.

How can this be? There may be a technical difference between invading a country’s territory with tanks and troops, or invading its airspace with showers of high-explosive bombs and rockets, but there is not much difference if you are on the receiving end.

Compare and contrast Western media coverage of Russian bombing of Ukrainian civilians, and of Israeli bombing of Iranian civilians.

Both actions are aggressive, violent and lethal. Both these attacks bring normal life to an end and subject millions of civilians to a new age of fear and uncertainty.

Really morally fussy people might also wonder if it is right to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists with drones. This is blatant political murder, which we rightly deplore when Vladimir Putin does it with poison.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also openly said that he intends, by his attack, to overthrow the government of Iran. How is this his business?

In any case, regime change has a very bad record in recent years. The CIA mounted a billion-dollar operation in Syria to get rid of the despot Bashar al-Assad. And, with some help from Turkey, it finally succeeded last December.

The trouble was that Assad was replaced by an Al Qaeda regime, sitting on top of a huge pile of bones and rubble. If we had found its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Birmingham or Chicago a couple of years ago, we would have arrested him as a terrorist.

But now everyone has to pretend that he is the new hope of the Middle East. As there is very little independent news coverage of what goes on in Syria, he may well get away with it for quite a while.

Regime change in Libya was just as bad. The West helped to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, using air power and helping various local militia factions, mostly composed of fanatics of one kind or another.

None of them were Blairites or Greens or Liberal Democrats, for sure. The country has not had a proper government since then and shows no sign of getting one.

Some defenders of Israel’s behaviour respond that Israel was provoked by various actions by Iran. They say that Tehran is implicated in the genocidal attack on Israel by Hamas in October 2023, or that its leaders are guilty of making aggressive public statements threatening Israel.

This is absolutely so. But such people have no business saying it, because they do not really believe in these excuses, though it suits them to pretend to do so.

Russia was also provoked by years of eastward Nato expansion and the siting of new missiles in Europe by the USA. But the same sort of people who now excuse Israel’s action – because of Iranian provocation – have always idiotically claimed that Russia was not provoked, despite all the evidence that it was.

In any case provocation – while it may help to explain things – is not a justification for aggressive violence, in law or morals. Only fools react to being provoked. It just helps to explain it, and to show that morality in foreign policy is so much bunk.

Then there is the complaint that Iran is planning to build nuclear weapons. Well, it may be. But back in 2015, with the blessing of the then US President Barack Obama, the West made a deal with Iran to prevent this from happening, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This deal, which came into effect in 2016, lifted sanctions in Iran in return for a promise to halt actions which could lead to a Persian nuclear bomb. It pledged to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, almost completely get rid of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium and scrap two-thirds of its centrifuges, vital for enrichment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Tehran was abiding by these and other conditions. The states which sponsored the deal (the USA, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) reckoned that its conditions would give early warning of any Iranian attempt to produce such a bomb, and allow us to respond before it was ready.

Even if the Iranians could enrich enough uranium to make warheads, it could still take another year for them to make a deliverable nuclear weapon.

As of May 2018, this deal seemed to be working. Most people thought it was a great success of intelligent diplomacy. But in that month Mr Netanyahu declared that Iran had been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, putting it in breach of the deal it had signed.

Very soon afterwards Donald Trump, then in his first term as President, pulled out of the arrangement. He said it was ‘a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made’.

Since then, Iran has felt free to abandon its promises, and nobody really knows how close it is to having a nuclear bomb, nor would there be any early warning.

Mr Trump yesterday repudiated the recent assessment, by his own hand-picked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that Iran has not been building a nuclear weapon. US intelligence agencies have quietly been saying this since 2007.

It is extraordinary for a President to have such an open quarrel with the intelligence establishment. The row suggests that Mr Trump has in fact decided to join Israel’s attack on Iran.

Why do this when so much of his support is among Americans sick of ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East? It is very hard to see.

But the great irony is that Israel itself has been hiding a secret nuclear weapons programme, which it began in face of strong American hostility (especially from JFK) and has done so since 1966.

It’s believed to have as many as 600 warheads, to be delivered by jet bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine launched cruise missiles. Visitors to southern Israel cannot fail to spot the reactor at Dimona, on the edge of the Negev desert, where the necessary metals are refined and enriched.

I wouldn’t recommend flying overhead as you would probably be shot down. But in 1986 an Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, went public to British media about the Israeli bomb programme. Israel’s authorities went wild with fury.

Mr Vanunu was lured to Italy from Britain, drugged and kidnapped by Israeli agents, carted home in a freighter, tried in secret and sent to jail for 18 years.

So Mr Netanyahu’s shocked outrage at Iran’s nuclear secrecy seems a little overdone, even hypocritical. So does Mr Trump’s outrage against Iran.

The USA long ago reconciled itself to the existence of Israel’s Bomb, just as it has got over Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, continuing to view that very Islamic, pretty undemocratic state as a key ally in the region.

And so the double standards go on. It all makes me long for the days when British foreign policy was frankly and openly self-interested, and we just stuck to defending this country, its territory and people, from foreign dangers.

War is hell and war is crime, and pretending that it is some sort of moral activity, or that freedom and democracy can be brought to the world by bayonets and howitzers is a good deal more futile and ugly than smearing lipstick on a pig.