Come on, Lammy. Get tough on Iran
With the regime weakened and humiliated, what do you have to lose?
If Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could have foreseen the state of the Middle East today back on October 6 2023, I wonder if he’d have called Yahya Sinwar and suggested he cancel the massacres? Let’s go through the list.
Sinwar himself: Dead. Mohammed Deif: Dead. Ismail Haniyeh: Dead. Hassan Nasrallah: Dead. Hamas: Castrated. Hezbollah: Eviscerated. The Houthis: bombed by an emboldened IDF. Bashar al-Assad: Holed up like a rat in Moscow, his military hardware and chemical weapons in smoking ruins.
Last but not least, the Iranian regime: Humiliated. Not exactly a win, is it? If you’ll indulge me, the biggest lesson of all this is simple. Don’t fuck with the Jews.
I imagine the Ayatollah anxiously parting his curtains before bed and scanning the dark sky for a sign of enemy bombers. Is tonight the night, he asks himself, nervously tasting his cocoa. After Israeli warplanes destroyed his Russian-made air defences in October, his regime finds itself defenceless.
Are they coming for my centrifuges, he wonders, before clutching his hot water bottle between his knees and scrolling on his phone under the covers. “Islamic Republic of #Iran doesn’t have proxy forces,” he tweets defiantly to his 1.3 million followers (at least he has 1.3 million followers). “If we decide to take action [against enemy] one day, we don’t need proxy forces.” He puts his phone down. He can’t sleep. Maybe he shouldn’t have tweeted that.
But let’s not linger on the poor old Ayatollah. Instead, let’s think about David Lammy. When the Foreign Secretary snuggles up with a bottle of Pinot Noir in front of the Gavin & Stacey Christmas Special, part of his mind is still at work. Iran is toast, he thinks to himself. The Middle East is an entirely different place compared to when I last thought about it. Mad.
What happened to the fabled axis of resistance? When Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles last April, the free world came to its defence, he recalls. But when Israel retaliated, Russia and China didn’t lift a finger. How about that?
In the pale light of the television, he pours himself another glass and puts it all together. With the collapse of Hezbollah and the fall of Assad, Tehran has lost tens of billions of dollars of investment, decades of work and its long-term regional strategy, he thinks. Israel and the West are in the rapid ascendance, particularly with Donald Trump in the pipeline. He cringes. Donald Trump. He drains his glass.
He opens his phone to look at what the Ayatollah is tweeting. “A #woman is a delicate flower and not a housemaid,” he reads. “A woman should be treated like a flower in the home. A flower needs to be cared for. Its freshness & sweet scent should be benefited from and used to perfume the air.”
Lammy rolls his eyes. What’s the man on? There’s even a community note beneath it, pointing out that “under Khamenei, women’s rights in Iran have faced severe restrictions”. Bloody idiot, Lammy thinks. He’s losing it. He returns to Gavin & Stacey and drains the bottle.
If the Foreign Secretary were to think through a few more steps, he would surely arrive at the conclusion that Britain needs to be on the right side when the fight comes. The Iranian regime is surely facing a reckoning. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. In desperation, the Ayatollah is pushing hard for nuclearisation. But there is little to stop the bombers now.
When Bibi and the Donald push the button, the Mother Of All Bombs tumble from the B-52s, the world’s worst regime finally falls and Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords, where does Britain want to be positioned? On the side of the democracies, that’s where, Trump or no Trump.
Which brings me to the point. In opposition, Labour vowed to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Tories had shamefully failed to do so, allowing themselves to be swayed by the Foreign Office’s argument that diplomatic cordiality was more important than stopping Iranian terrorists from attempting kidnaps, stabbings and subversion on the streets of Britain.
Labour intended to right this wrong and fall in line with the United States, which blacklisted the most malevolent arm of the Iranian state back in 2019. After going into government, however, Lammy placed the issue firmly on the back burner.
The RAF may or may not participate in any looming attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But one thing is certain: when the strike takes place, it would be a better look for the IRGC to be banned in Britain. What do we have to lose? The humiliation of the regime has profoundly changed the strategic calculus.
No longer can Whitehall apparatchiks convincingly argue – as they have done in the past – that it would be better not to provoke Iran into severing diplomatic ties; that it would be better to avoid having our embassy closed in Tehran; that it would be better not to depart from the position of our European allies; and that we can make do with existing counter-terror legislation.
Iran is now firmly in the position of supplicant. In my view, as I have argued repeatedly, Iran always was in that position. It’s just that the West didn’t believe in its own strength, allowing the weaker party to take advantage.
As I wrote in April: “Our cringing desire to ‘avoid escalation’ lies at the heart of the problem, as it has bled so easily into appeasement. Iran is a far smaller military power than the West. Its defence budget amounts to under $10 billion, compared to the United States’ $850 billion, our nearly $60 billion and Israel’s $23 billion. The Ayatollahs know this very well. But they also know that we prefer to invite them for talks, talks and more talks. And when the missiles fly, we play defence.”
If Lammy were to start the New Year by blacklisting the IRGC, it would send a strong signal to Washington, Jerusalem and Tehran. Would Iran sever diplomatic relations? Maybe, but I don’t think it is likely. It needs all the influence it can get.
The European powers would get the message and fast-track their own plans to ban Tehran’s terrorists. Prominent Jews, Iranian dissidents and the public at large would be better protected at home. Most importantly, we would show the world – and ourselves – that we are no longer afraid of our own shadow.