It is remarkable that many of those who swore never to repeat the mistakes of the Iraq invasion are now set on another misconceived adventure.
Once again we are told that a Middle Eastern nation needs to be bombed so it can taste the fruit of freedom. Once again the propaganda machine is on overdrive. Once again it is said that the regime is days away from attacking not just Israel but all of its Western allies with weapons of mass destruction. This is a claim that, in the case of Iran, has been made since 1975, before the rise of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini and the creation of his Islamic Republic. Once again we are told that Tehran will hand its nuclear weapons – nuclear weapons it does not have – to terrorist groups.
The initial claim that Israel attacked Iran on 13 June to dismantle its nuclear programme did not last long. Two days later, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview to Fox News saying that regime change was his real goal. He added that assassinating the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was under consideration (Trump later said he was safe – for now). This was the same Netanyahu who in 2002 promised the American public that invading Iraq would create a new Middle East. An invasion, he argued then, “will have, I guarantee you, enormous positive reverberations on the region”. You might think the results were calamitous, but from Netanyahu’s perspective, the 2003 invasion was a resounding success. Iraq became a failed state, incapable of anything beyond surviving from day to day. Now Israel is able to exert considerable influence in its Kurdish statelet in the north.
In 2003 we would have called this neoconservatism. But neoconservatism has evolved. It lost the thin veneer of idealism it once had and turned into a thoroughly nihilistic ideology, openly advocating brute force. Why be so coy as to carry out covert assassinations? If two decades ago neoconservatives envisioned a world made safe by the spread of Western democracy, today they opt for the multiplication of failed states and collapsed regimes. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Egypt – all formed a geography of desolation. The impact Israel and Western democracies have had on the Middle East in recent decades can only be compared to the destruction brought about by the Soviet Union in Central Europe. That region recovered after 1989 but its glorious civilisation never did.
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