Jeff Blackett

Anyone who has been following the developments in the Middle East through the eyes of the BBC and Sky News would be forgiven for thinking that the United States and Israel have suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Iranian regime. Driven by an unshakeable hatred of Donald Trump, ‘experts’ from legal professors and security analysts to the UK’s best-known journalists have been actively willing for the US to fail. That the Iranian regime is framing this ceasefire as a victory is, of course, hardly surprising. What’s harder to stomach, however, is that so many are willing to jump on the propaganda of a regime that three months ago butchered 40,000 of its own citizens for having the audacity to take to the streets and demand freedom after 47 years of brutality.

There is a certain type of British parliamentarian for whom the world is not a complex web of shifting allegiances and existential threats, but a neatly ruled jurisdictional straightjacket for the West. To hear Emily Thornberry or the leadership of the Green Party tell it, the recent US and Israeli operations against the Iranian regime are not a necessary excision of a regional cancer, but a simple "breach of international law." Case closed. Bring in the tea. The legal case for action against Iran is not merely "arguable"; it is compelling One expects this kind of reductionism from the protest lines, but it is deeply unsettling to see it calcify into the official posture of a British government.