It would be unwise to join hands with Donald Trump on the Iran war - Andy Brown

Much has been made about the importance of sticking by international law and not allowing political leaders in one country to decide that they don’t like the political leaders of another and to try to kill them. We’ve argued hard and long that Vladimir Putin’s pre-emptive strike was morally wrong.

Our legitimate outrage over Putin’s actions ought to lead us to have similar concerns when other political leaders try to steal land by military means or to think they have the right to make decisions for other nations about which of their political leaders will live or die. It is important to be consistent and to hold countries we often agree with to the same standards of behaviour as those we don’t.

Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has been routinely stealing land from people who have owned that land for many generations but happen to have the misfortune to belong to a racial group that his government doesn’t value the rights of. The systematic flattening of Gaza as a collective punishment for the horrible actions of Hamas makes it hard to view the current Israeli government as a champion of the right to life, liberty and freedom for all.

Routine land thefts at the point of a gun in the West Bank completely undermine the credibility of Netanyahu’s government when it claims the right to stand up for the genuinely oppressed people of Iran. He has the arms to attack and intimidate his neighbours. He doesn’t have the moral authority to be viewed as a fair-minded, kindly decision-maker on who should run Iran.

As for President Trump he also comes with heavy moral baggage that makes it hard for him to claim the right to act as the world’s policeman regardless of the views of the United Nations. Threatening to invade Greenland and conspiring to steal Canadian provinces that contain oil are not the actions of a reliable well-meaning neighbour who can be trusted to make decisions on behalf of countries many thousands of miles away.

Unless my memory is completely failing me Donald Trump got elected on the basis of a promise to end US involvement in foreign adventures and to focus instead on the needs of his own people. That makes it hard to see what electoral mandate he has for deciding which unpleasant world leader he will kill next.

It ought to be clear and obvious to anyone that the regime in Venezuela and the religious zealots in Iran are indeed horrible and dangerous people. It ought to be much less clear that it is morally acceptable for other nations to set themselves up as the judge and jury of which of them should be killed. Particularly when the leaders of the nations launching the attacks are not known for their disinterested fair-minded impartiality and concern for the well being of others.

Trump so dislikes the United Nations that he expensively assembled his own tame Board of Peace. It contains some very dubious world leaders with their own track record of putting down dissent. What gives the leaders of Saudi Arabia the right to pontificate about states that impose an extreme version of religious authority on a reluctant population? The last time I looked they were still beheading people for sending out social media posts that the government and the religious authorities don’t like.

There are plenty of regimes and plenty of foreign political leaders that people in Britain despise and detest. Often with very good reason. That doesn’t give our nation the right to allow air bases in Britain to be used to bomb those countries. Such action feels more like getting our retaliation in first than legitimate self-defence.

There is a long list of parts of the world where our country’s leaders have involved us in reckless ill-thought out military adventures which have ended very badly. So Keir Starmer was absolutely right to warn us of the danger of taking part in yet another attempt at rapid and consequence free regime change.

He was utterly wrong to contradict his own warning hours later by capitulating to requests to allow US planes to take off from British soil. This government is still too reluctant to distance ourselves sufficiently from Donald Trump. A man who has proved to be an enemy of every decent value that the good people of Britain want this country to stand for.

It is unwise in the extreme to take any actions that even remotely link us to invasions of other countries and extrajudicial killings. Better by far to maintain the clarity of our stance behind Ukraine and to try and prevent Donald Trump from conspiring with Putin to force it into a bad peace.

Andy Brown is a member of the Green party but as always these are his independent views and not a party line or the views of any of his fellow councillors.