What long-term lessons China, Russia and the Global South are learning from the abandonment by the entire West of the principles of international law, we shall see in the decades to come.
Gandhi Hospital in Tehran on Monday after U.S.-Israeli strikes. (Hossein Zohrevand/Tasnim News Agency / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk
There has scarcely been an attempt to pretend any justification in international law for the attack on Iran and murder of its leader. The response of the U.K. government, focusing almost entirely on condemning Iran for exercising its legitimate right of self-defence, takes the Keir Starmer dishonesty meter further off the scale.
The RAF has been actively involved in genocide in Gaza for two years with its surveillance and logistic support for the IDF. It is now fighting for Israel again; intercepting Iranian missiles is not defensive; it is joining in the attack on an already vastly overmatched opponent.
I am afraid that the truth is the Iranian attempt to defend itself militarily will be less impactful than many anti-imperialists hope. The astonishing amounts of money spent by the U.S. government on military and surveillance technology simply do have real-world effect.
Here in Venezuela, having seen the major sites struck by the U.S. on Jan. 3, I have concluded that no act of betrayal was needed. Just overwhelming force and precision technology applied against a technologically unequal opponent whose key capabilities were all on open hilltops or in unhardened barracks.
Iran is much more militarily sophisticated, but facing exponentially more force. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in his own home, not hiding away. He is going to prove a lot more powerful as a martyr than as a ruler with his internal critics.
We are facing not only a period of unapologetic imperialism to which virtually all Western countries are prepared to defer, but a return of medievalism, both in the sheer barbarity and scale of physical abuse, as witnessed in Gaza and in general Israeli brutality, and in use of kidnap and murder as methods of high policy. Legitimising the killing and kidnap of leaders of opposing states is of course a double-edged sword.
Having sanctioned genocide, mass killings and deliberate destruction of medical facilities and staff, the mass murder of children, as well as the kidnapping and murder of heads of state, it is hard now to imagine almost any atrocity which the Western powers are in any moral position to condemn.
The reflection of the Palestinian flag in Ali Khamenei’s glasses at a funeral ceremony for Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Aug. 1, 2024. (Khamenei.ir / Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
While Iran’s military ability to strike back is limited, the ramifications of this attack will not be. The rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have reverted to the norm of being not only reliable U.S. and Israeli satraps, but promoters of atavistic hatred of Shia Muslims.
The West is deliberately exploiting the Shia/Sunni divide, as it has for centuries; but this will now destabilise the region for decades. Iraq in particular is going to be convulsed, and so will Pakistan. In Bahrain, the Shia population has been held in check by its Sunni rulers using systematic Western-sponsored murder and torture. Using it as a base to murder the Ayatollah is going to blow back.
It would appear that we are going to witness an aerial campaign to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, as in Iraq where 65 percent of clean drinking water, 50 percent of hospitals and clinics and 80 percent of electrical generation was destroyed by “liberation” by the NATO powers. The object is the destruction of Iran as a viable state.
It is worth recalling that Iran used to be a Western-style state with a reasonable democracy. It was the election of the Socialist Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951, and his nationalisation of British Petroleum, which was met by the MI6- and C.I.A.- sponsored coup of 1953. The vicious and vainglorious rule of their puppet Shah was the cause of the theocratic revolution.
Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran who was ousted by a U.K.-U.S, coup, while under house arrest in Ahmadabad, Iran, in 1965. (Behnam Farid /Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Escalating Western sanctions were imposed by the U.S. or E.U. on Iran in 1979, 1984, 1995, 1996, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019 and 2025. There were U.N.-approved sanctions imposed from 2006 to 2016. These very substantially hampered Iran’s economic development.
The curious thing is that the founding myth of the Western powers is that economic development leads to an expanding, educated middle class which promotes both economic and social liberalism and produces the conditions for democracy.
By this reading, if you wished to cement in power an authoritarian government, then limiting economic development is the way to do it. There is something in this reading; I do not doubt that the West’s relentless efforts to strangle Iran – which have had some real success – have hampered its political development.
That is not to accept all the Western myths about Iran. Female education is very strong, and there is extensive female participation throughout economic and governmental institutions. Iran has an extremely good record of tolerating and even supporting minority religious communities, including the Jewish community.
There are plenty of women in Tehran without head coverings – Iran is far more tolerant in this regard than Saudi Arabia. While it retains a retrograde intolerance of gay people, it acknowledges gender dysphoria and assists trans people.
I am not prepared to give a moment of countenance to arguments that bombing Iran back to the 19th century is going in any way to improve the lives of its people. It did not do so in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It was a disaster which unleashed waves of refugees upon Europe, leading directly to the rise of the far right.
I think it is unlikely to change the form of government in Iran in any significant way. Regime change by bombing is a highly problematic concept.
What it has done is to remove Ayatollah Khamenei, whose fatwa on the creation of a nuclear weapon was the only reason Iran does not have one.
It is delusional to believe that Iran, with its excellent scientific base, could not have developed nuclear bombs in secret away from those monitored enrichment programmes, had it chosen to do so. What is likely to result in the medium term from this conflict, if it long continues, is a more primitive, more atavistic and nuclear-armed Iran.
The Iran nuclear deal torpedoed by Trump in 2018 had provided a rare moment of hope. With sanctions easing, there were chances of both smoother economic development and reform in Iran. That is why Israel wanted the agreement scuppered.
U.S. team on way to Iran nuclear negotiation meeting at U.N., New York City, 2016. (State Department)
The attempted obliteration of Iran is part of a systematic attempt to eliminate by physical force all pockets of resistance to American hegemony.
We have seen Rubio’s astonishing assertion of Imperialism as a positive force. Matthew Lynn in The Washington Post exemplified the new Western doctrine. He mocked China for its pacific policy. He argued that for China to build infrastructure for the Global South was futile because the United States might simply seize, blockade or destroy any infrastructure by military force. This he viewed as not shameful, but a great triumph.
What long-term lessons China, Russia and the Global South are learning from the abandonment by the entire West of the principles of international law, we shall see in the decades to come. None of this is going to be good for anyone.
It is not just a Trump phenomenon. Biden fully supported the Gaza genocide. Almost all major political parties throughout the West are under firm Zionist control, as is all of the significant major media and the ownership of every significant alternative media platform.
Iran has provided, directly and through proxies, the only military opposition to the creation of Greater Israel. This war is for Greater Israel. But it is also a wider effort to re-establish the failing economic dominance of the United States by military control of key resources.
There is no part of the world which will be safe from the fallout.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
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This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Maybe I am reading from the wrong news scripts. The west appears to be hearing only the west’s side of the story. We hear little about the death toll and damage that is occurring in Israel. Evidently they are getting their comeuppance. Which, to be frank, I fully support, after two years of watching one of the biggest armies in the world mass murdering thousands of unarmed defenceless civilians, while at the same time rubbing it into our faces that they are the most moral army in the world.
It is also pleasing to see in Bahrain, they have sent their royal leader running out of the country into Saudi Arabia. Again, I am not perturbed that Iran has managed to rid Jordan of their radar, which is used to assist the Israeli air force. And, it appears the Iranians have managed to capture US Delta forces on Iranian soil. Now these same forces are being held as prisoners in Iran.
In the US the news, it also appears Saudi Arabia and Israel pressured Trump to attack Iran. When one thinks about it, the wealthy elite of the Arab countries are an utter disgrace, in that they were all happy to support the United States and Israel against their own people. We should ask ourselves how could they have stood by without a flicker in their eyes, and watch the overbearing cruelty of the daily extermination of the Palestinian people?
There are two core issues that Israel has made very clear to the world: that they intend to steal as much Arab land as possible and murder as many Arab people as possible, so that they may create for themselves ‘The Greater Israel’ and, that they will never accept either a one-state or two-state solution. Yet to date, the world has chosen to ignore this and look the other way. Why?
Great , Greater , Greatest .
Then What ?
The US has abandoned all civility and is openly engaged in a campaign of world conquest. China and Russia better start pushing back hard while they are still able to do so.
Who’s the dwarf with the mighty hair piece?
Absolutely no apologist for the people in that photograph, but I think your views on the extremely worrying situation might be more acceptable here?
The smug Enlightenment certainty was if the ethnic Euro masses and the dark uncivilized tribes were educated to be rational, the world would of course become just like western Europe. The lands of the best and the brightest whom lessers should emulate. But after WWI, it was said the Enlightenment died in the trenches; inevitable progress was only another belief.
We among the lessers and the non-Euros can’t quite see why an econ system defining away devastation of human communities and ecosystems as irrelevant externalities is supposed to be admirable. Or how employing so many scientists and engineers to design ever more lethal WMDs is rational.
Neocons desperate to preserve their fantasy of empire and their own personal power have the same outlook–the imperial past as exemplary. What they hear is an Atlanticist echo chamber. Those of us on the left coast of North America aren’t so limited. The power of nature is very evident here. We also face the Pacific and the future.
Rafi, your second paragraph is powerful and asks the questions the west cannot even imagine. May I quote you as one of the tag lines following my signature on emails I send? deborah
Murdering the Ayatollah created a martyr, with the effect of uniting rather than dividing the Iranians. It has strengthened the Iranian government, not weakened it!
Quite how the Americans didn’t know this would happen reveals a lot about their unwillingness and inability to comprehend how other countries and cultures work, and their heavily flawed and biased ‘intelligence’.
That bodes badly for them in this war, because it also suggests they don’t understand that the Gulf states will see clearly that their ‘alliance’ with the US is worthless if it can do little or nothing to protect them from attacks. After this, will they still remain ‘loyal’ to the US? I doubt it.
The Greater Israel project is predicated on destroying Iran so that Israel can dominate the region – but it is likely to fail as the US also fails to ‘defend’ Israel against Iran – leaving a severedly battered and weakened Israel with its last card to play [no, not victim!] but the Samson [nuclear] Option!
That’s the trajectory as I see it at the moment. But I’m sure China and Russia will want to step in at some point to stop that happening, although I can’t see how since Israel is a ‘wild card’ rogue state that doesn’t respond well to pressure from anyone. I can see it firing nukes at Tehran soon.
Whatever the outcome, Israel is going to be seen for what it is – a deeply rotten evil state hell bent on regional domination with absolutely no respect for countries, peoples, lives, or anything else. An out-of-control fantatical monster. Equally, all remaining doubts about the true nature of the USA regime will also dissappear.
Both counntries have crossed every possible red line humanity has. They are the biggest threat to the safety of world than anything else at this point – by far.
Sabby Sabs last night put forth the proposition that if the duo of Israel and USA significantly crush Iran in service of “Greater Israel”, time will come when Israel will eventually gut the USA in service of becoming the next hegemon in the Middle East.
I hope Craig is incorrect about Iran’s chances, but the US and Israel do have greater firepower and resources. The US may be more tolerant to costs imposed by Iran, and more single-minded on destroying the state. Even while US bases are hit with precision missiles, large blocks in Tehran are getting razed with heavy cruise missiles. The empire can and is striking back.
If Iran CAN win, it will still probably appear quite leveled by the end and Tehran could look like Gaza. I hope that what strategic advantages and intelligence they have can force Trump out of the war and put real deterrence on Israel. Everyone is hoping for a Suez moment, to roll back the tide of violent imperialism. May the hope prevail and these mad men fail.
From the I Ching: “When evil is branded, it thinks of weapons”. The US and Israel have been self-branded. They have no recourse but to weaponry. Their arsenals will collapse.
We considered it skillful to weaponized religion against the USSR to further the Polish advisors antipathy with orthodox Russia and communism with now a pope inspired resurrection of old orthodox wars promoted by Biden.
Shia revolution turned out to not be the best response to the Shah and OPEC oil embargo assist by the Saudi king soon assassinated too.. So much for the Afghan method and return to pit Iraq against Iran.
Just think if western dominance increases the war between our ages old bisectual warring may return with good King Henry VIII reborn.
Whose god is ruling our Supreme Court or is it just the God of Roman and Viking war and raiding parties dueling it out . Is our religion of defamation for occupation of the false God of war to be resurrected and we crucify the world for it.
It’s an oil “phenomena” ; all these countries produce oil…even Gaza has gas fields off its coast.
Would not the world be a better place for everyone — the rich and the poor — if peaceful existence among nations was given priority over threats and bombs? I really don’t support any war efforts since before Afghanistan. The world order seemed to be on track under the post-World War II agreements, the Marshall Plan foremost. To me these post 911 wars have seemed to be about egos rather than security. Does anyone really think a nuclear Iran would blow up the world? They have no incentive to do so. We’ve gone through this exercise dozens of times in my adult life where the US says “extreme consequences will ensue if X gets nuclear weapons.” Then they get nuclear weapons and nothing happens. Nothing changes. Idle words really aren’t in the interest of national security. Surely the crazies and nut jobs ought to have something to think about, but a war in Iran to uphold Israel’s Middle East position makes no sense whatsoever. Last, the destruction of the Deep State that Bannon insists is the way to go is poppycock. Ayn Rand wrote a novel; she didn’t govern nations.
don’t you love the pic of the 1916 U.S. negotiating team? With the women bringing up the rear?