This morning’s events, Israel’s coordinated strikes on Tehran followed by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States has commenced “major combat operations” against Iran, represent a calculated escalation that is as lawless as it is historically predictable.
The parallels with the Iraq catastrophe of 2003 are not merely rhetorical; they are structurally identical. Then, as now, United Nations weapons inspectors had found no evidence of the alleged threat, Hans Blix’s UNMOVIC conducted 731 inspections across 411 sites between November 2002 and March 2003, repeatedly warning the Security Council that while Iraq cooperated on “process”, it had provided no “substantive” proof of disarmament, precisely because the weapons did not exist. Yet the Blair government, having already committed to Washington, pressed ahead with the “dodgy dossier” and its fabricated claim that Iraqi WMD could be deployed within 45 minutes. The Chilcot Inquiry later established unequivocally that military action was “not a last resort” and that the legal basis for invasion was “far from satisfactory”, noting that Attorney General Goldsmith’s initial memo to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, advising that the war would be lawful only if the Prime Minister unilaterally deemed it in Britain’s national interest, was so damaging that Hoon was instructed to burn it.
What we are witnessing regarding Iran follows the same script of diplomatic sabotage. Just two days before today’s strikes, Omani-mediated talks in Geneva had concluded with “significant progress”, with Iran reportedly agreeing to degrade its highly enriched uranium stockpiles to their lowest possible levels. This mirrors the pattern of June 2025, when Israel launched “Operation Rising Lion”, citing the so-called Begin Doctrine of preventive war, mere hours after diplomatic channels remained open, killing 610 Iranians and unleashing a twelve-day war that achieved nothing but regional carnage. The doctrine, first invoked by Menachem Begin to destroy Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, has evolved from a posture of last-resort survival into a mechanism of permanent, anticipatory aggression.
To claim, as Trump has, that Americans face an “imminent threat” requiring “annihilation” rhetoric is to recycle the very lies that Blix debunked two decades ago. The IAEA confirmed in February 2026 that Iran had no structured weapons programme, a finding echoed by U.S. intelligence assessments. Yet the decision to dismantle Iran was evidently preconceived, representing the culmination of four decades of hostility that began with the 1979 revolution and the 444-day hostage crisis, a rupture that transformed Iran from a client state into an adversary and which has been exploited by successive administrations to justify economic strangulation and now, once again, illegal warfare. The invocation of international law here is not academic pedantry. The invasion of Iraq constituted a prima facie violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter; the strikes on Iran replicate this aggression while compounding it with the crime of attacking a state that was actively negotiating in good faith.
There is a darker historical resonance here. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979—just months before the Iranian hostage crisis began—it too was lashing out from a position of declining hegemony, attempting to project authority it no longer possessed. The decade-long quagmire that followed drained Moscow’s treasury, isolated it diplomatically, and accelerated the empire’s collapse within a decade of its withdrawal in February 1989. The United States today mirrors that trajectory: resorting to kinetic force against a nation of eighty-five million people while its own infrastructure crumbles and its diplomatic alliances fracture.
I am disturbed not by surprise; this has been telegraphed for months, with Trump deploying two aircraft carriers and threatening “far worse” attacks since January, but by the deliberate repetition of history. Israel, having successfully pushed for the destruction of Iraq in 2003, has now achieved its long-standing objective of drawing America into a war with Iran. The tragedy is that the hardline elements in Tehran who have prepared for this confrontation for forty years are now vindicated, while the moderates who pursued the JCPOA and the recent Oman talks are silenced. What emerges is another illegal war, another devastated region, and the cultivation of lasting grievances that will fuel regional instability and extremist recruitment for a generation. These consequences, manufactured entirely in Washington and Jerusalem, will be paid for in civilian blood across the Middle East and in the inevitable corrosion of global security.