After President Trump ordered the US bombing of Iran nuclear sites, Mirror columnist Darren Lewis assesses the true damage to peace in the Middle East and beyond as it could potentially spark a new world war
Are you feeling safer, then? Now that the US President – who campaigned on the repeated insistence he’d never drag us all towards a Third World War – has committed a widely condemned bombing on Iran that many fear could spark just that?
Do you worry about the message being sent out by two nuclear weapons states bombing a non-nuclear weapons state without having been attacked first? Are you any more confident that Operation Midnight Hammer has “obliterated” – in the words of Donald Trump – Iran’s nuclear capability when the widely held view is that the weekend strikes were theatrical?
Particularly as Trump’s vice-president JD Vance replied on Sunday night when asked about his boss’s assessment: “Severely damaged versus obliterated – I’m not exactly sure what the difference is.
Do you really share both men’s total belief that their mission has been a success when the objective, expert analysis suggests the so-called “bunker buster” bombs used are more or less useless when dropped on mountainous terrain?
Do you think Israeli citizens in underground bunkers across their country, Americans in Middle East military bases and ordinary people across Europe, now feel any safer with the blue touch paper well and truly lit by a man who unilaterally engaged the US military without Congressional authorisation?
Whatever you think of the Iranian regime, would you, if you were that country, heed the call from US and European leaders to return to the negotiating table when you were already there as your country was bombed behind your backs last week?
Would you, if you were Iran, see the point of returning to the negotiating table when, having agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in July 2015, Trump tore it up three years later? Are you as fascinated as this columnist that the bloodthirsty commentators and politicians, hungry for Britain to join a bombing campaign without a shred of decent intelligence, will be the same ones insistent that not a single one of the refugees or asylum seekers displaced by any escalation should be allowed to escape to the UK?
Do you really believe a conflict with Iran would be as quick and simple as the 20-year Afghanistan war to replace the Taliban with the Taliban? Are you feeling any more confident that the rest of the world actually cares that, amid it all, the hostages taken on October 7 appear to have been forgotten about?
Or that Israel is still pounding Gaza with 55,000 Palestinians dead there, including 15,000 children with the number of people killed queueing for food rising to 400 on Sunday? Are you worried that former Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said on Sunday that “a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads.”?
Are you still waiting for the dossier that backs up Trump’s move to dismiss his own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted earlier this year (she has since fallen into line, of course) that Iran was not trying to create a bomb?
Are you with the International Atomic Energy Agency who also insist there is no evidence to suggest Iran is breaching guidelines?. Or are you willing to place your faith in Trump – the man who describes actual truth as fake news?
Are you more comfortable that the UK has learned its lessons after being hoodwinked into joining the war on Iraq 22 years ago? Or are you now realising that a systematic attempt remains ongoing to manipulate the British public into rejecting peace in favour of setting the world on fire again?
Do you feel any more confident that the US – where women cannot do as they wish to their own bodies and whose homeland security agents are literally pulling people off the streets, detaining them illegally and violating their human rights – are in a position to decry an Iran regime whose citizens are on TV, unified in the streets supporting their leadership?
And do you think this carry-on over the last few days will make the Iranians more or less likely to say to themselves: “We really do need a credible nuclear deterrent”?
It is frightening to think that this could be the moment that really did motivate Iranian leaders to go that way. That should worry us all.