If the West is weak over Iran's attacks, we will all suffer

It’s easy to think of what’s happening in the Middle East as “a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”, as Neville Chamberlain infamously said of the Sudeten crisis in 1938. Awful as Iran’s bombardment of Israel on Saturday might have been, why does it concern us?

But just as Chamberlain’s words were so very wrong back then – we were at war with Germany the next year – it’s equally true that Iran is a danger, not only to Israel and the wider Middle East but also directly to us, right now.

Most immediately, Iran’s funding of the Houthis in Yemen has given the terror group the ability to attack shipping in the Red Sea, which is the strategic waterway that links Europe and Asia. Some 10 percent of the world’s oil passes through the Red Sea, and the Houthis’ attacks – backed since January by the presence of an Iranian warship – have led to a rise in the price of oil. BP and other oil companies have had to use different routes, leading to longer journey times and higher costs.

But the Iranian threat to the UK is far more insidious than trade disruption. Last year the director-general of MI5 revealed 10 Iranian plots to kidnap or murder British residents in 2022, and last February security minister Tom Tugendhat told the Commons that “between 2020 and 2022, Iran tried to collect intelligence on UK-based Israeli and Jewish individuals. We believe this was a preparation for future lethal operations”. This was after he had spoken of the “very real and specific threats towards UK-based journalists working for Iran International” – an independent Persian-language news channel.

Sure enough, last month Pouria Zeraati from the channel was attacked by a hit squad. He is now in hiding with his family, lucky to be alive. You would have to be both naïve and foolish not to accept that this was the work of the Iranian regime, via its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the regime’s terror coordinator.

Mr Tugendhat also confirmed that Iran uses criminal gangs to spy on Britain’s Jews in preparation for an assassination campaign against prominent members of the community, “mapping” Jews to lay the ground for high-profile revenge murders should Israel launch a military attack against the Iranian regime. That may, of course, now be imminent after the Iranians sent drones and missiles to Israel. As the minister put it: “The Iranians are using crooks based in Britain to spy for them. You can be very clear that I wouldn’t have mentioned Jewish and Israeli targets unless I had good reason to do so… I do not issue these warnings lightly.”

There is no doubt that Iran is operating in the UK through the IRGC. And yet, unbelievably, it is allowed to do so by our own government. The IRGC has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many governments, including the US, but not here. The Foreign Office argues that because the IRGC is an arm of the Iranian state it’s complicated to proscribe it (unlike Iran’s proxy groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas) and that allowing the IRGC to operate here gives us leverage with the Iranian regime.

It’s a form of appeasement – that if we don’t anger the Iranians too much they might listen to us. The idiocy of that argument should have been clear 35 years ago, when Iran’s then Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwah calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses Khomeini declared blasphemous. The fatwah remains in place – and Rushdie has just released a new memoir, Knife, about when he was attacked and blinded in one eye at a public appearance in the US in 2022.

Iran is a theological regime which believes its destiny is to destroy the West. Iranian schools teach that an apocalyptic war will herald the return of a messianic figure called the Mahdi who with 313 of his fighters will conquer the world and bring in a new Islamic era. And yet we still deal with Iran as if it is susceptible to diplomatic reason – a mistake that was exposed in brutal fashion on Saturday when its missiles rained across the Middle East on their way to Israel.

Iran takes one message from our refusal to act against it, as we saw on Saturday – that we are weak. In that context, when President Biden said “Don’t” after being asked last week what message he had for Iran, was less of a warning than a plea. And now, after Iran treated it with impunity, what has been the West’s response? To tell Israel that it shouldn’t take any retaliatory action against Iran.

If we don’t proscribe the IRGC now, after such a display of contempt for the West, our weakness will be set in stone. And we will all suffer the consequences.