Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States will serve that purpose. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the great saviour of the British Labour Party in taking them to victory in 2024, is finding himself in sinking desperation. Being less popular than a pandemic, he has much work to do if he is to retain his premiership till and after the next election.
This deepening involvement in the Iran War has been messy. Britain, along with France and Germany, were initially clear in their joint February 28 statement that they had not participated in the strikes on Iran but were “in close contact with our international partners, including the United States, Israel, and partners in the region.” Instead of condemning the pre-emptive attack on Tehran as a crime of aggression in breach of the United Nations Charter and international law, the statement went on to “condemn Iranian attacks on countries in the region in the strongest terms.”
Within a matter of hours, Starmer rebadged his country’s engagement in the conflict as a matter of self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, making what can only be regarded as a spurious use of international law – or whatever was left of it. The press release on March 1 again reiterated condemnation for Iran’s “reckless and ongoing discriminate attacks against countries in the region”, taking no account as to why Tehran was engaged in such an avenging task. But international law permitted the UK and its allies “to use or support force in such circumstances where acting in self-defence is the only feasible means to deal with an ongoing armed attack and where the force used is necessary and proportionate.”
It followed from this that the UK had “military assets flying in the region to intercept drones or missiles targeting countries not previously involved in the conflict.” A request from Washington had also meant that his government would “facilitate specific and limited defensive action against missile facilities in Iran which were involved in launching strikes at regional allies.” The statement went on, weakly, to ward off suggestions of any “wider involvement in the broader ongoing conflict between the US, Israel and Iran.”
On March 9, in an oral statement to the House, the UK Secretary of State for Defence John Healey revealed the sheer scale of British involvement. The briefest of references was made to Starmer’s justification along lines of collective self-defence under international law. To put some flesh on the bone, it was important to inflate the threat posed by the Iranian regime, a force of cruel destruction that had “slaughtered protestors in its own streets”, supplied Shahed drones to Russia in its “illegal invasion of Ukraine” and conducted cyber-attacks against Britain and plotted assassinations on it streets.
Healey confirmed that the US was using British bases to target Iranian missile sites from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. He also outlined various “defensive operations” that had taken place: the destruction of Iranian drones over Jordan by F-35s; the use of Typhoons to shoot “down targets heading towards Qatar”; and “counter-drone units defeating further attacks against coalition bases in Iraq.” Various “defensive air sorties in support of the UAE” were also being conducted. Given this burgeoning list, it is surely a matter of time, given the prolongation of conflict, for Starmer to join the full-blooded effort and hit sites in Iran proper. The pretence to legality will have all but collapsed by that point.
The US President Donald Trump, for his part, has been petulant, scornful of Starmer for not doing more. “This is not Winston Churchill,” he moaned to journalists over the PM’s initial tardiness in permitting the use of British bases to launch strikes on Iran. In a social media post, Trump revealed that the UK, “our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all, is finally giving serious thought to sending two aircraft carriers to the Middle East.” With a bitchy turn, the President informed the PM that “we don’t need them any longer – But we will remember.” He had “no need for people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”
The dangers of closer involvement with the US in this war should be all too clear for Starmer and the Labour Party. In March 2003, as a human rights lawyer, he warned the government of Tony Blair that pre-emptive action against Iraq to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein of alleged weapons of mass destruction would find itself, from a legal perspective, on thin ice. “The mere fact that Iraq has a capacity to attack at some specified time in the future is not enough.” No one believed that Iraq was imminently about to attack the UK or its allies, and any claim to self-defence “would sit uncomfortably with the US position that military action is justified to destroy such weapons of mass destruction as Iraq may have, and to bring about a change of leadership.”
Despite these warnings, Blair, with a poodle’s dignity, joined President George W. Bush alongside that other servitor, Australia, to attack Iraq, finding no WMDs and inviting the deserved opprobrium of the international law community. The public inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the war, chaired by John Chilcot, noted that “the circumstances in which it was decided there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory”. The phase of planning and preparations for a post-Saddam also proved “wholly inadequate”. But the inquiry report also made an unimpeachable observation troublingly relevant as Britain gets ever more involved in the current crime of aggression: “The US and UK are close allies, but the relationship between the two is unequal.”
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