Same Script, New Target: How Trump's Iran War Theatre and Starmer's Iraq Revival Are Manufacturing Tomorrow's Disaster
We are witnessing one of the most brazen and morally bankrupt reversals of reality in modern international relations. Israel has launched unprovoked military strikes against Iran, yet it is Iran that is being told to show restraint and back down. The aggressor has become the victim, the victim has become the aggressor, and Western governments are not just accepting this grotesque transformation - they are actively promoting it as normal and necessary. The inversion has reached such obscene extremes that President Trump has demanded "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" from Iran while Israeli bombs continue falling on Iranian territory, literally ordering the victim to capitulate to its attacker (Middle East Eye, 2025).
This is not diplomatic complexity or nuanced foreign policy. This is deception designed to enable war crimes while making opposition appear unreasonable. Through deliberate manipulation of language and legal concepts, Israeli officials have managed to present a campaign of strikes as legitimate self-defence, and Trump has weaponised American power to demand victim submission to ongoing aggression.
Iran is being portrayed as the primary threat that needs to be contained, even though Israeli strikes were followed by Iranian responses. This deliberate inversion of cause and effect serves predetermined objectives. The same narrative frameworks that transformed the invasion of Iraq into defensive necessity, that reframed the destruction of Libya as humanitarian intervention, and that continue to present destruction in Gaza as security policy, are now being deployed against Iran with sickening consistency.
Al Jazeera's comprehensive documentation reveals the staggering cynicism behind this operation. Netanyahu has maintained virtually identical warnings about Iranian nuclear capabilities for over three decades. In 1992, he claimed Iran would have nuclear weapons "within three to five years." In 1995, 2002, 2012, 2015, and now 2025, he has repeated variations of the same lie with mechanical precision (Al Jazeera, 2025). This is a methodical construction of narratives designed to justify wars.
Meanwhile, international organisations document devastation in Gaza that makes a mockery of Israeli claims to defensive necessity. Amnesty International's satellite analysis reveals extensive devastation including "the total razing of Khuzaa in May 2025" as evidence of planned civilian targeting (Amnesty International, 2025). The mental gymnastics required to present a state engaged in such destruction as a threatened party requiring international protection, reveals the complete moral bankruptcy of contemporary international relations.
If strikes can be reframed as self-defence, if organised destruction can be characterised as security policy, and if victims of aggression can be demanded to surrender to their attackers, then we have abandoned any pretence of objective truth in international relations. We are witnessing the well-ordered demolition of moral reasoning itself, and Western leaders are not just complicit - they are active participants in this destruction.
The Anatomy of Aggression Disguised as Defence
The current crisis did not emerge from Iranian aggression, despite the carefully constructed lies suggesting otherwise. The sequence of events reveals a calculated Israeli decision to launch strikes designed to provoke the very conflict that Israel now claims to be defending against. This is deliberate provocation followed by victim-blaming, executed with the cynical precision of a state that has perfected the art of manufacturing consent for its own aggression.
The timeline reveals a pattern so mechanically repetitive it would be laughable if it weren't enabling violence. The same official has made identical warnings for three decades regardless of actual developments, diplomatic progress, or intelligence findings. Therefore, what we are witnessing is the operation of a propaganda machine designed to justify aggression. The fact that Western institutions continue to treat these recycled lies as credible intelligence shows their complete abandonment of rational analysis in favour of alliance politics.
The scope of current Israeli operations extends far beyond any conceivable defensive necessity. Deutsche Welle's reporting on international legal analysis reveals that experts view the strikes as constituting "prohibited self-defence" precisely because they target civilian infrastructure and scientific personnel rather than limiting themselves to immediate military threats (Deutsche Welle, 2025). This pattern demonstrates objectives that go far beyond neutralising specific military threats to encompass broader goals of regime destabilisation and population intimidation through systematic violence.
The Corruption of Legal Language: Destroying the Meaning of Words
Through the corruption of legal concepts, Israeli officials have managed to present ‘preemptive strikes’ as legitimate exercises of self-defence. This is the deliberate inversion of fundamental legal and moral categories - created to serve predetermined objectives – and is enabled by Western institutions that have abandoned their responsibility to uphold international law.
International law requires both imminent threat and proportionate response for legitimate self-defence, as established in the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945). Yet current Israeli actions obliterate these concepts beyond any recognisable legal framework. The clock-like violation of these basic legal requirements reveals that we are not witnessing self-defence, but aggression disguised through linguistic manipulation.
Despite decades of Netanyahu's warnings about Iranian nuclear development, US intelligence assessments indicated that Iran was not actively pursuing nuclear weapons development (Middle East Eye, 2025). But these consistently false threats continue to be used to justify immediate military action against theoretical future capabilities. This represents the complete abandonment of evidence-based policy in favour of conclusions justified through deception.
Under the framework being promoted by Israel and enabled by Western governments, ‘self-defence’ no longer requires actual threat. It can be triggered by theoretical future threats, by the mere existence of scientific capability, or by the possession of technology that could potentially be used for military purposes. This expansion transforms self-defence from a legal limitation on violence into a blanket justification for any action against any designated enemy.
The Complete Inversion of Victim and Aggressor: Demanding Surrender from the Attacked
The logical endpoint of this corrupted framework is its most morally obscene manifestation: the demand that Iran, the target of unprovoked aggression, demonstrate restraint and accept limitations on its sovereignty while its territory is being bombed.
Iran, which did not attack or invade any territories, is being held as the party responsible for de-escalation while bombs fall on its territory. When Iranian forces respond to attacks on their homeland - responses that would be considered not just legitimate but obligatory under any rational interpretation of international law - these actions are immediately reframed as evidence of Iranian aggression, justifying further Israeli strikes.
Under recognised principles of international law, the party that initiates hostilities bears primary responsibility for the conflict and has the obligation to cease aggression. Yet current narratives demand that Iran, having been attacked without legal justification, must be the party to make concessions and accept constraints on its sovereignty while the aggression continues.
When European leaders call for restraint from all parties in response to clear aggression, they implicitly accept the premise that victim and aggressor bear equal responsibility for conflict resolution. This falsehood enables continued Israeli aggression because it removes pressure for them to cease their attacks, while placing the burden of de-escalation on Iran, the victim of unprovoked assault.
Imperial Arrogance Disguised as Liberation
The ultimate objective behind Israel's campaign against Iran is not defensive necessity but regime change - the fundamental imperial assumption that Western powers have the right to determine which governments are legitimate and to use violence to impose their preferred alternatives. Middle East Monitor's analysis explicitly identifies this as Netanyahu's core objective: "Netanyahu dreams of regime change" in Iran, revealing that current military operations are designed not to neutralise specific threats but to weaken Iranian society until political transformation becomes possible (Middle East Monitor, 2025).
This illustrates the most deeply troubling moral dimension of contemporary imperial ideology, which is the assumption that certain populations exist as ‘unpeople’ - their sovereignty and self-determination are subordinate to Western preferences. The fundamental question that exposes this arrogance is simple: who gave Western powers the right to decide which governments are legitimate? Why do ‘we’ get to choose ‘their’ leaders while our own sovereignty remains sacred and untouchable? The inability to answer this question honestly reveals the purely imperial nature of regime change doctrine.
Imagine if Iran announced that American democracy had failed, that the US government was illegitimate, and that Iranian forces would begin bombing American cities until Americans ‘came to their senses’ and removed leaders Iran found objectionable. Imagine if Iranian officials then declared they would continue this bombing campaign until Americans chose a government that Iran pre-approved as acceptable. The immediate recognition of this scenario as absurd and criminal highlights the identical absurdity and criminality of Western regime change operations.
But this is precisely the framework being applied to Iran, justified through the same deception that has enabled decades of catastrophic interventions. The historical pattern documented in our sources reveals the rote quality of this process: identical lies about threats, identical claims about liberation, identical promises about democratic outcomes, followed by identical results of devastation and regional destabilisation. The transformation of Iraq from a functioning state into a failed state that spawned ISIS, the destruction of Libya from Africa's most prosperous nation into a slave-trading failed state, the ongoing devastation of Syria - all were justified through identical rhetoric about removing illegitimate leaders and promoting democracy.
The current Iran operation follows this established template with machine-like precision. Al Jazeera's documentation of Netanyahu's thirty-year pattern of identical nuclear warnings reveals how predetermined regime change objectives are disguised as responses to evolving threats (Al Jazeera, 2025). The recycling of identical justifications across decades exposes that we are witnessing the implementation of pre-set imperial objectives disguised through propaganda, designed to manufacture consent for violence. The international community's failure to reject this imperial arrogance outright represents a profound moral failure. It enables continued violence against populations whose only crime is existing under governments that Western powers find inconvenient. If international institutions accept that certain governments can be declared illegitimate and destroyed simply for not aligning with Western interests, they are helping to dismantle the idea of national sovereignty- an idea that has long protected the world from wider conflict.
The UK's Institutional Capture: Starmer's Shameful Capitulation
The trajectory of the UK's response to the Israel-Iran crisis provides a textbook example of how quickly democratic institutions can be captured and redirected to serve codified objectives without meaningful public debate or parliamentary oversight. This is the bypass of democratic governance in favour of executive decision-making guided by alliance politics rather than legal considerations or public interest.
BBC reporting documents a transformation so rapid it exposes the complete hollowness of British democratic processes. Prime Minister Starmer's initial calls for de-escalation on June 13 were abandoned within 24 hours in favour of positioning military assets to potentially support Israeli operations by June 14, with deployment of jets to the region confirmed by June 15 (McKiernan, 2025). This stands for a complete policy reversal accomplished in less than 48 hours, with no parliamentary debate, no public consultation, and no meaningful media scrutiny of the decision-making process.
Rather than presenting the policy shift as a fundamental change requiring parliamentary approval, government officials framed it as a natural evolution of existing commitments. Terms like ‘alliance obligations’ and ‘shared security interests’ were deployed to make potential support for clear violations of international law appear as routine fulfilment of existing agreements, rather than new policy decisions requiring democratic authorisation.
The UK has positioned itself to provide military support for operations conducted by a state that international organisations have documented as engaging in devastation across multiple fronts.
How Starmer Sold British Principles
The UK's rapid policy shift reveals sophisticated mechanisms through which democratic institutions can be captured and redirected without triggering the alarm bells that would normally accompany such fundamental changes. Starmer has not only failed to resist this manipulation. He has actively participated in it.
When government officials consistently present support for Israeli operations as reasonable responses to Iranian threats, they leverage the presumption of competence. This creates an environment where opposition appears to be based on incomplete information or ideological bias rather than legitimate analysis of available evidence. Starmer has weaponised this presumption to bypass democratic scrutiny of his abandonment of legal principle.
The exclusion of alternative perspectives from mainstream discourse reveals how democratic debate has been constrained through institutional capture rather than formal censorship. When major media outlets and political institutions consistently frame Israeli actions as defensive responses while characterising Iranian reactions as unprovoked aggression, they create a skewed information environment: one where rational analysis becomes impossible, and prescribed conclusions appear natural and inevitable.
The Normalisation of Legal Violation: Making War Crimes Routine
Perhaps the most morally damning aspect of the UK's response is the speed with which support for clear violations of international law has been normalised through linguistic manipulation and institutional authority. This normalisation creates a culture where opposition to war crimes appears unreasonable rather than legally and morally necessary.
When British officials describe Israeli strikes on Iranian territory as legitimate exercises of self-defence, they participate in the corruption of international legal language (McKiernan, 2025). This linguistic manipulation makes rational discourse about international law impossible by making basic legal categories meaningless through misuse and institutional authority.
The process reveals how quickly democratic societies can be conditioned to accept fundamental violations of their stated principles when those violations are presented through appropriate institutional channels with sufficient authority. The transformation of war crimes into routine policy, of aggression into self-defence, demonstrates the fragility of democratic values when confronted with sophisticated propaganda techniques deployed through trusted institutions and enabled by complicit leadership.
New Labour 2.0: The Return of Blair's War Machine
The most damning aspect of Starmer's capitulation is not merely that it represents institutional capture, but that it constitutes the deliberate restoration of the exact same personnel and methods that gave Britain the catastrophic Iraq War. This is not random policy drift. This is the reconstruction of Blair's war machine with the same architects, the same techniques, and the same contempt for democratic oversight that marked New Labour's most destructive period.
The New Statesman's analysis reveals the extent of this restoration: "As Starmer contends with a fraught political landscape, he has increasingly turned to figures from the Blair administration" (New Statesman, 2025). Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff from 1997-2007 and architect of the Iraq invasion's political strategy, has been appointed as Starmer's national security adviser. Liz Lloyd, Blair's deputy chief of staff during the Iraq period, now serves as director of policy delivery. Alan Milburn, Blair's health secretary, advises the Department of Health. Pat McFadden, a committed Blairite, serves as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Peter Mandelson, who recommended Powell for his current position, is the preferred candidate for US ambassador (Guardian, 2025).
The same individuals who perfected the art of presenting preconfigured war objectives as responses to evolving threats are now applying identical techniques to the Iran crisis, with predictably identical results.
The constitutional implications are particularly damning when examined alongside Starmer's specific language about military support for Israel. Guardian reporting reveals his exact words when asked about defending Israel: "I will always make the right decisions for the UK" and "We are moving assets to the region, including jets, and that is for contingency support" (Guardian, 2025). When pressed about ruling out defending Israel from Iranian strikes, Starmer refused, stating: "These are obviously operational decisions, and the situation is ongoing and developing and therefore I'm not going to get into the precise details."
This language is identical to Blair's incremental escalation strategy that bypassed parliamentary oversight. The House of Commons Library documents Starmer's previous commitment to parliamentary approval for military action: during his leadership campaign, he promised "giving Parliament a vote on military action" and stated that parliamentary approval for deploying troops was "a principle that I want to see entrenched" (House of Commons Library, 2024). Yet his current approach mirrors Blair's bypass of these commitments through conditional support that avoids direct parliamentary authorisation.
The historical irony is devastating: the Labour Party that was supposed to learn from Iraq's catastrophic consequences has brought back the same ministers to implement the same strategies with the same contempt for democratic oversight. Starmer's "contingency support" and refusal to rule out military action follows Blair's template precisely: start with conditional commitments, claim operational necessity, avoid parliamentary debate, then present escalation as inevitable response to evolving circumstances.
With military assets positioned and conditional commitments made, the UK now waits for the convenient pretext that will ‘morally’ compel full involvement; the manufactured crisis that transforms Starmer's choice into apparent moral obligation. This is the final stage of Blair's playbook: create the conditions where intervention appears not as policy preference but as unavoidable moral duty.
The architects of the Iraq disaster have not only evaded accountability - they’ve been welcomed back. Starmer has embraced their influence. He’s hired the same people, handed them the same roles, and is letting them run the same playbook. The lessons of Iraq have not been forgotten, but deliberately erased.
Trump's Theatre of Contradictions
Nowhere is the moral inversion of global politics more shameless than in Trump’s approach to the Israel–Iran crisis. While Israeli bombs fall on Iranian territory, the State Department promotes Trump as a "president of peace" committed to "diplomatic solutions" (Middle East Eye, 2025). This is nothing short of the corruption of language designed to make aggression appear as peace-making while demanding victim capitulation to ongoing violence.
The phrase "peace through strength" has been weaponised to justify the exact opposite of its stated meaning. Rather than using strength to deter conflict, Trump deploys American power to enable Israeli aggression while demanding Iranian surrender. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce's claims that Trump is "committed to diplomatic solutions" become obscene when examined alongside his simultaneous threats of violence against Iranian leadership and demands for unconditional capitulation (Middle East Eye, 2025).
"Peace" becomes a euphemism for enforced submission, "diplomacy" becomes a cover for ultimatums backed by violence, and "strength" becomes a justification for enabling aggression against weaker parties. The sophistication of this linguistic manipulation reveals the nature of contemporary propaganda operations designed to make moral reasoning impossible.
The Demand for Unconditional Surrender
The most blatantly immodest aspect of Trump's approach is his explicit demand that Iran surrender unconditionally to its attackers. His Truth Social posts demanding "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" from Iran while Israeli strikes continue represent the complete abandonment of any pretence of legal or moral reasoning (Middle East Eye, 2025). This is the humiliation of victims designed to normalise aggression through victim-blaming.
Trump's threats extend beyond policy demands to personal violence against Iranian leadership. His suggestions that he could kill Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei while simultaneously calling for Tehran's 14 million residents to evacuate their capital reveal the sadistic nature of contemporary American foreign policy discourse (Middle East Eye, 2025). These threats of mass violence are designed to terrorise civilian populations while presenting such terrorism as reasonable policy.
The timing of these demands also exposes their fundamental dishonesty. Trump issued his surrender ultimatum while Israel was conducting its fifth consecutive day of strikes on Iranian territory, making clear that "unconditional surrender" means acceptance of ongoing aggression rather than cessation of hostilities. This framing implies that ceasefire deals are available, but that Iran is somehow preventing them - even though Iran is the victim of ongoing attacks and Trump is demanding submission rather than offering genuine negotiations.
Enabling Escalation Through False Peace Narratives
The most sophisticated aspect of Trump's propaganda operation is the deployment of contradictory messages engineered to provide plausible deniability for escalation, while maintaining the appearance of peace-seeking. Diplomacy for the cameras, threats behind the scenes - Trump’s dual-track approach keeps the aggression going, all while spinning a false story of peace.
But the most revealing aspect of Trump's approach is its deliberately theatrical nature. His over-the-top statements, his "we may or may not bomb Iran" uncertainty, and his oscillation between threats and deal-making create a performance designed to normalise the underlying moral inversion by making it appear as entertainment rather than implied violence. The theatrical uncertainty - will he/won’t he bomb Iran - keeps audiences focused on his unpredictability rather than the fundamental illegitimacy of demanding victim surrender to ongoing aggression.
This theatrical approach serves multiple propaganda functions simultaneously. It allows supporters to claim Trump seeks peace while enabling continued escalation, provides diplomatic cover for allied governments supporting Israeli operations, and creates confusion about American intentions that prevents effective opposition to violence. Most insidiously, it transforms violence into a form of political entertainment where the focus becomes Trump's performance rather than the moral bankruptcy of the underlying policies.
But the theatrical uncertainty is not genuine deliberation. It is a codified performance designed to coerce consent for inevitable aggression.
We all know Trump will bomb Iran, just as we know Starmer will provide military support.
Trump's simultaneous demands for Iranian surrender and claims to seek deals demonstrate the ultimate theatrical inversion. He presents himself as offering reasonable negotiations while demanding unconditional capitulation, creating frameworks where Iran appears responsible for the absence of diplomatic progress despite being the victim of ongoing attacks. This victim-blaming dynamic mirrors classic abuser psychology: the aggressor demands submission while portraying the victim as unreasonable for not accepting ‘generous’ terms that amount to complete capitulation.
When the world's most powerful state continually deploys contradictory messages about peace and violence as entertainment, it signals the complete abandonment of honest diplomatic discourse in favour of pure manipulation. Trump has corrupted and transformed international relations into a reality television show where violence becomes a background entertainment for his political performance.
The Weaponisation of Victimhood
Israel - a nuclear-armed regional power conducting extensive military operations across multiple countries - is being presented as a threatened victim requiring international protection.
This turns basic ideas of right and wrong upside down, confusing who is the victim and who is the aggressor. The mental effort needed to believe this version of events shows just how clever today’s propaganda is: it’s built to justify violence while keeping the public on side.
Israeli officials regularly claim they’re only responding to threats, not starting conflicts. This turns every act of violence into something that looks like self-defence. As Middle East Monitor explains, this is a way of using the idea of self-defence to justify repeated violence for political gain (Middle East Monitor, 2025). Their phrase “acceptable murder” sums it up: killing is seen as justifiable when it’s done by those labelled as victims, against those labelled as aggressors - even if the reality is more complex.
The Normalisation of Systematic Violence: Making Atrocity Routine
Perhaps the most damning aspect of current developments is not only that violent destruction is occurring, but that it has been normalised through linguistic manipulation and institutional complicity to the point where it no longer triggers moral outrage or demands for intervention.
The process of normalisation operates through desensitisation to escalating levels of violence, combined with linguistic frameworks that make the destruction appear reasonable and necessary. Each new development is presented as reasonable response to previous provocations, The destruction of civilian infrastructure, forced displacement of entire populations, and use of starvation as weapon of war have all been normalised through this process, transforming war crimes into security measures and crimes against humanity into defensive necessity.
Media and political discourse play crucial roles in this normalisation process. When major outlets consistently frame brutality as defensive responses while characterising resistance as unprovoked aggression, they create environments where violence appears natural and inevitable rather than chosen and preventable. The effect is to make opposition to violence appear unreasonable, rather than legitimate position based on international law and moral principle, completing the inversion of moral categories that makes continued violence possible.
Learning to Accept the Unacceptable
The current inversion we are witnessing builds on decades of conditioning that has prepared populations to accept increasingly extreme violations of stated principles. The transformation of the Iraq invasion into defensive necessity, the reframing of Libyan destruction as humanitarian intervention, and the ongoing presentation of systematic violence in Gaza as security policy have all contributed to the normalisation of moral inversion as standard operating procedure in international relations.
Each successful inversion makes the next one easier by establishing precedents for accepting obvious lies when they serve pre-set political objectives. The recycling of identical justifications across different conflicts reveals the nature of contemporary propaganda designed to bypass rational analysis in favour of emotional manipulatio. Netanyahu's thirty-year pattern of identical nuclear warnings demonstrates how populations can be conditioned to accept the same lies repeatedly when they are presented through appropriate institutional channels with sufficient authority.
The effect of this conditioning is the creation of populations that no longer expect logical consistency or evidence-based reasoning from their leaders. Instead, they accept conclusions justified through whatever means are convenient, creating environments where deception becomes normal and rational discourse becomes impossible.
The international implications of this collapse extend far beyond specific conflicts to affect the broader possibility of democratic governance and international cooperation. When populations lose the capacity for critical analysis of their leaders' actions, they become unable to hold those leaders accountable for violations of law and principle. The result is the transformation of democratic societies into authoritarian systems that maintain the appearance of legitimacy while abandoning any commitment to truth or justice.
Conclusion: The Choice Before Us
We stand at a moment of profound moral reckoning. The inversion of reality we are experiencing with the Israel-Iran crisis is not an aberration, but the logical culmination of decades of the continual erosion of international law, democratic accountability, and moral reasoning itself. The choice before us is stark: we can continue to accept obvious lies and deceptions as normal features of international relations, or we can demand the restoration of truth and principle as the foundation of legitimate governance.
The responsibility for this crisis lies squarely with its architects and enablers. Trump has weaponised American power to demand victim surrender to ongoing aggression while presenting himself as a peacemaker. Israel has perfected the art of presenting violence as defensive necessity through thirty years of identical lies about non-existent threats. Starmer and other Western leaders have abandoned their stated principles to enable clear violations of international law through rapid policy reversals accomplished without democratic oversight or public debate.
But the responsibility extends beyond these primary actors to include every institution and individual that has chosen complicity over principle. When major media outlets consistently frame obvious aggression as defensive responses, when international organisations fail to enforce their own legal standards, when democratic populations accept deception without meaningful resistance, they all contribute to the normalisation of violence and the destruction of moral reasoning itself.
If we accept the premise that strikes constitute self-defence, that destruction represents security policy, and that victims of aggression must surrender to their attackers, we abandon any possibility of international law or moral principle constraining state violence. We create a world where might makes right and where the powerful can commit any atrocity while presenting themselves as victims deserving international protection and support.
The path forward requires more than policy changes. It demands the restoration of truth and principle as the foundation of international relations. This means rejecting obvious lies regardless of their source, demanding evidence-based reasoning from our leaders, and refusing to accept violence as normal or necessary, regardless of how it is presented or justified.
The choice is ours, but the window for meaningful action is closing rapidly. Every day we accept the current inversion of reality makes the next inversion easier and more extreme. Every time we allow a deception to pass without challenge, we contribute to the destruction of the very concepts of truth and justice that make civilised society possible.
The responsibility lies with Trump, with Israel, and with every world leader who falls in line with this destruction of moral reasoning. Their complicity has consequences, and those consequences will be measured not just in immediate human suffering but in the long-term destruction of the legal and moral frameworks that have prevented global catastrophe for decades. The choice before us is whether we will be complicit in this destruction, or whether we will demand the restoration of truth and principle before it is too late.
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References
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