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It is unsurprising that Iran considers the UK bases used by US bombers to attack the country – RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean – to be “legitimate targets”.
Such threats might have been dismissed in the past as unrealistic bombast, but in a year when warfare in the Gulf and Ukraine has been dominated by drones, along with cruise and ballistic missiles, nations that once believed themselves safe have suddenly become vulnerable. Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia in March which failed in flight or were shot down, but the Iranians clearly believed they had the range to reach the island. Diego Garcia is 2,350 miles from Tehran, while London is 2,750 miles away.
Seeking to balance between not offending Donald Trump and refusing to join more fully in his war on Iran, Britain has made a fine distinction between “defensive” US bombing missions, which are allowed, and “offensive” ones, which are not. But since Iran sees itself as the victim of an unprovoked attack by the US and Israel on 28 February, the British argument about the US defending itself and its allies is unlikely to impress the Iranians.
The Iranian foreign ministry accuses the UK of being an “accomplice” in the US war, while the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says any country which supports the US militarily “will be responsible for the consequences and repercussions”. It claimed in a statement published on the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency website on 23 July that a US bomber based at RAF Fairford had bombed Iran two days earlier. While there is some dispute over the range of the longest-range Iranian missile, those with a reduced payload of explosives might well be able to reach the UK.
Experts play down the military effectiveness of an Iranian missile attack on the UK, but the Iran and Ukraine wars are showing that many targets previously considered safe because of their distance from the fighting are turning out to be highly vulnerable.
A further compelling reason why the Iranian threat should be taken seriously is because of a radical change in Iranian strategy. When the US and Israel attacked Iran in February, the Iranian leadership unexpectedly switched to a new – but clearly long considered – strategy of striking back hard at those countries from which the US air offensive was being launched. A hail of missiles and drones struck the fabulously wealthy Arab states on the south side of the Gulf, who found that hosting American military bases guaranteed destructive Iranian retaliation from which the US was not able to defend them.
The strategy probably worked better than the Iranians expected. Despite being pounded by over 20,000 US and Israeli air strikes, it could not resist. Iran ended the first phase of the 37-day war in a more powerful position than at the beginning with control of the Strait of Hormuz and much enhanced leverage over the Gulf states whose rulers discovered to their horror that an alliance with the US came at a far higher cost than they had bargained for. Not only could they no longer export their oil and gas, but their status as secure transport and business hubs had been exposed as a mirage.
When the US resumed its mass bombing in July, Iran predictably resumed its strategy of expanding the war geographically, using its missiles and drones to attack US bases in Jordan and Syria, and, above all, to get their Houthi allies in Yemen to close the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow stretch of water between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden through which Saudi Arabia had been exporting some five million barrels a day of its oil, diverted from the Gulf.
Immediately, the price of crude oil surged past $100 (£75) a barrel. Trump keeps announcing that the US has destroyed Iran’s military capacity, with its air force wiped out and its navy at the bottom of the sea. But when two tankers belonging to the Greek shipping company Dynacom tried to exit the Gulf on Sunday night by creeping along the Omani coast – heavily defended by US aircraft, and after days of US bombing of the Iranian side of the Strait – they were both hit by Iranian fire.
One of the vessels was abandoned by its crew and was towed into Iranian waters according to satellite imagery. It will be a long time before shippers and insurance companies feel confident enough to send other vessels through the Strait.
The problem for Britain is that the military conflict with Iran, which Trump believed was going to be short and decisive, is turning into a forever war. Both sides still believe they have war-winning cards in their hands. The US can bomb Iran at will, potentially destroying its bridges, power stations, oil refineries and desalination plants in a much expanded version of what Israel did in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
But this will not stop Iran keeping its grip on the Strait and expanding the war horizontally by retaliating in kind against a US ally for every strike against Iran. When a US drone hit an Iranian border crossing with Iraq this week, the Iranians immediately hit the main Iraq-Kuwait border crossing.
Iran believes that the best way to combat the US is to strike at its allies, which means that the British balancing act of giving conditional support to the US is not sustainable forever.
In March, a few days after the US and Israel began the war, the UK gave permission for RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia to be used to target Iranian military infrastructure used to launch attacks on Gulf countries and vessels in the Strait. Andy Burnham has not changed this policy and did not object when he was informed last week that the agreement with the US was being extended. But Trump says he is close to making a decision about launching “a massive attack” on Iran, which would presumably mean trying to return the country to a pre-modern era without electricity and fuel.
This is feasible, but it does not guarantee military victory and may simply convince the Iranian leadership that Trump-style diplomacy is a blind alley and their only option is to fight on. In any case, it will be difficult for Britain to pretend the “massive attack” is defensive in nature.
Britain and Europe largely went along with Trump’s assassination of the Iranian leadership and starting a war while peace negotiations were underway, hypocritically tut-tutting about the violent Iranian response. The Iranians have clearly decided that the best way to weaken the US-led alliances is to make the allies pay a price for their compliance. There is no reason why Britain should expect better treatment from Iran than Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Geographical distance from the battlefield is no longer the defence it once was. Vladimir Putin curtailed a military march-past in Red Square because of fear of drones and soon we may be doing the same in Trafalgar Square and the Mall. International airports and huge power stations provide vulnerable and immovable targets, be they in Dubai or Heathrow.
In the year of the drone, everybody is in the front line.
Further thoughts
Any new prime minister is faced with the tricky problem of at one and the same time promising radical change and guaranteeing comforting stability without the capacity to deliver either in a meaningful way. Change requires levers to carry it out and time to use them. Stability often depends on factors beyond the Government’s control – such as the price of oil and gas, which in turn reflects what is happening to oil tankers in the Strait and the Bab al Mandab at the mouth of the Red Sea.
But it is politically intelligent for Burnham to keep taking concrete and swiftly deliverable steps, like capping bus tickets at £2, cutting VAT on electricity bills, reducing business rates for pubs and other venues and pledging to end rough sleeping. These demonstrate Burnham’s direction of political travel and his agenda and priorities at the centre of the political map, sending a message to people that the Government is on their side.
Ending rough sleeping may appear like a marginal issue, but it focuses public attention on the much bigger issue of housing in general.
Burnham has the advantage when denouncing Thatcherism, as it is increasingly becoming conventional wisdom that these measures damaged Britain. Who now would dare argue that the privatisation of water and public utilities and the sale of council houses has not been a disaster? Yet even a couple of years ago, former chancellor Rachel Reeves found it necessary to say complimentary things about Margaret Thatcher.
Burnham may have the zeitgeist – the spirit of the age – with him in the way that was true of Thatcher during the high tide of neo-liberalism and the lauding of the free market in the 1980s.
Beneath the Radar
The Odyssey movie has provoked a culture war exchange of hostilities about Helen of Troy being played by a black actor. I suspect that this distasteful dispute is helping divert attention from the fact that the movie is boring and overhyped, a superhero production that plods doggedly from scene to scene, in which a variety of villains try and fail to get rid of him. Odysseus is a straight-arrow Greek warrior, without the Artful Dodger-type cunning of his Homeric original. His relationship with his son Telemachus reminded me of Batman and Robin in a Marvel comic.
I thought at first that I must be missing something in a movie which so many respected reviewers praise and take seriously. Possibly it gets away with a clunky plot because the Homeric original endows it with a certain gravitas. No doubt the prestige of the director, Christopher Nolan, and the amount of money spent – $250m (£188m) according to the studio – helps get it big audiences, but I wonder how many really enjoy it? I have yet to hear from any friend who did like it, and most were caustic. “A plonker deluxe,” was the comment of one, and another declared it inferior to the classic action movie Troy.
Perhaps the film has some hidden depths that I missed, but I am still amazed at the movie’s success (Photo: Aaron P/Bauer-Griffin)Even as a superhero movie, it has some bewildering features, such as the big fight scenes, when Odysseus is trapped in the cave of an unfriendly giant at the beginning or is shooting down with bow and arrow his wife Penelope’s unwelcome suitors at the end. These scenes are all shot in semi-darkness while in the open air instead of the glowing colours of the Greek islands, and the Aegean scenes take place in a sort of North Sea gloom.
Perhaps the film has some hidden depths that I missed, but I am still amazed at the movie’s success. The best account I know explaining why a pedestrian movie is converted into a hit is given in my late friend Edward Jay Epstein’s The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood.
Cockburn’s Picks
I find Vali Nasr of Johns Hopkins University the most penetrating of commentators on the US-Iran war. Here is a piece in the Financial Times on the escalating war.
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