Cameron Thomas MP responds to the Iran situation

The Iranian regime, and those at its head, have for decades invested in and supported a regional terror network which has caused instability across the Middle-East. Its support for Russian terrorism in Europe has sown misery across the civilian population of Ukraine. I have personally evaded Iranian-designed Shahed drones in Kharkiv, but many innocent men, women and children continue to be killed or maimed by them. It was recently reported that security services have tracked over 20, potentially-lethal, Iran-backed plots within the UK.

Through its morality police, Iran enforces the strictest interpretation of Islam upon its people, most notably upon women. It maintains a policy of physical abuse and torture of women who stray from their strict dress code, and has been particularly brutal to those who have taken a public stand against the hijab, including instances leading to life-changing injuries and death.

Public unrest has been answered with the execution of tens of thousands of Iranians desperate for change, including most recently this year.

The death of Ayatollah Khomeini should be met with relief by liberal-minded people across the world, and not least for Iranians, but what follows may well be worse.

I can envisage circumstances by which I could have supported military activity. If I was convinced of a long-term strategy to install a democratic government in Iran, run by Iranians and for Iranians, then I could conscionably support such a plan. If military action formed a part of that strategy, then I could conceivably support British operations to that end, given our extensive interests in the region. I may conceivably have put aside my contempt for President Trump, and my disdain for Prime Minister Netenyahu, if I believed that their military operations against Iran were being carried out according to a military, economic and diplomatic strategy toward Iranian democracy, but the rights of Iranian people are not the goal of these aggressors.

Between 2003 and 2004, I was deployed four times to the Middle East, after a British Prime Minister foolishly followed a US President into Iraq. I believed in the cause in 2003, I was convinced by the propaganda, which portrayed Saddam Hussein as a madman wielding weapons of mass destruction, aimed at Britain and our allies. It was folly, and even conservative estimates put the death toll at 150,000. It cost a further 182 British lives. The most damning legacy of that ill-planned intervention, was the rise of Islamic State, which casts its shadow over the free world even today. We would be fools to ignore the lessons of Iraq under pressure from an unreliable and unstable US President, and from his apologists in the UK.

The truth is, President Bush in 2003 had made a far more convincing case for the Iraq War than President Trump has, for his attacks on Iran. It is telling that this week, both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage have declared that the UK should have joined President Trump in his latest reckless foray, as though proud sovereign Britain should blindly follow our more powerful ally. We know that Trump is cognitively unequipped to envisage the lasting implications of such activity as this, but we must exercise better judgement.

Only six weeks since he ignorantly and unforgivably disparaged the contribution of British troops to the ISAF campaign in Afghanistan, this weekend Trump casually dismissed the deaths of American troops as “the way it is”. It is the way Trump has decided it is. 

Badenoch and Farage want to put British lives on the line, for blind loyalty to a man this emotionally illiterate?

Our people are worth more to me than they are to Trump, Badenoch and Farage. This is not a political game, it is about lives. I have seen the human cost in Ukraine. I have been the human cost in Iraq. The UK must play no offensive role in this latest US folly. The attack on British sovereign territory in the Mediterranean by an Iranian proxy was deliberately designed to widen and drag us into this conflict. We must resist. For now, our commitment must be to the defence of our interests in the region, and to humanitarian aid as required.

If UK interests continue to be subjected to attack, then decisive retaliatory strikes should not be ruled out.