Cold Storage

Reply to Zack Polanski, Omid Djalili tweets:

Nothing is proved yet Zack. The fact that you are spreading misinformation is appalling for someone in your position. To date no one has been allowed to see any evidence of casualties or even the site itself.

The regime says it’s America or Israel. The Americans say they were nowhere near the area. Here’s what Iranians inside Iran say:

IRGC blew it up themselves to fill it up with dead bodies of children they’ve kept on ice hidden away in cold storage from the January slaughters to put on display in order to blame their aggressors.

The fact that we have not seen the evidence yet is a red flag as we know the regime would have gleefully paraded those images on television and all over the internet. Most probably they were caught on film transferring the bodies hence why there is now a media black out on this story, as well as a full internet blackout.

As Iranians we know how this regime operates. We’re talking about new levels of evil.

So any narrative like the one you are pushing Zack actually supports the regime in their “don’t care how many die as long as we stay in power” quest.

For the love of God and humanity, please stop.

#IranMassacre

#IranIsraelWar

So, that’s his career over, then? If not, why not? Then again, no one’s career was ended for having parotted at least as obviously false and as grossly offensive arguments for the previous wars. Several of those people are now drawing the line at this one because they found Donald Trump just too, too vulgar, darling. And several are supporting this war. I honestly do not know which is worse.

The Power of Positive Thinking?

In the red jacket is Paula White, on whom Donald Trump should insist as the next Supreme Leader of Iran, refusing to accept anything less than unconditional surrender. She would bring refreshing connections to the Unification Church, and through that to the decidedly non-Shia Nation of Islam with which it organises mass events; in turn, the Nation of Islam promotes Dianetics, the foundation of Scientology.

If the White Supreme Leadership lasted only until the next President of the United States required another regime change in Iran, then Dame Sarah Mullally may well retire as Archbishop of Canterbury during the next Parliament, with Nigel Farage possibly in a position to choose her successor. Since Reform UK’s Britain would by then be the principal redoubt of Trumpism, then Farage should nominate White. It is historically anomalous that eight of the nine Archbishops of Canterbury in living memory have been Trinitarians, even if the fifth was an atheist. Her Grace would correct that discrepancy.

As for the prosperity gospel, Trump grew up in the Marble Collegiate Church of Norman Vincent Peale, who even took Trump’s first wedding there. The Power of Positive Thinking was the old mainline American Protestant tradition reconfigured by the New Thought movement, and prosperity theology is that reconfiguration of Pentecostalism. It was only to be expected that White should head Trump’s White House Faith Office. Now to bring her, first to Tehran, and then to Canterbury. Complete with her third and current husband, Jonathan Cain. Yes, the one out of Journey. Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

Might Archbishop Paula heal the rift with GAFCON? In part, perhaps. Several of its African provinces do in fact ordain women all the way to the episcopate while maintaining an uncompromisingly conservative stance on homosexuality, yet Anglican clerical opposition to the ordination of women in the British Isles, in North America, in Australia and in New Zealand is very largely homosexual and is by no means uniformly celibate in that. The first category is often influenced by Pentecostalism, while the second most emphatically is not.

For the time being, GAFCON has adopted a sort of presbyterian polity. If that, since ruling elders are no less πρεσβύτεροι than preaching elders are, unlike the lay members of the Global Anglican Council. Next in that line, so to speak, will be the Society of Saint Pius X, rule of which is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it was considered an aberration that the last Superior General was a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would have be subject, as they are again now, with more soon to be added. The fate of the Petite Église and of the беспоповцы awaits. From those latter, at least, have sprung phenomena that have made Paula White look like Saint Paul himself.

Earnestly Contend

Consider the fabulous Vank Cathedral in Isfahan, and the persistence of the Pilgrimage of Saint Thaddeus 700 miles away. Then contrast them with the fact that having destroyed, in Artsakh, one of the oldest Christian civilisations in the world, Azerbaijan is the main supplier of oil and gas to those who were actively trying to destroy the oldest of all, including the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, burning down churches and spitting on priests as a matter of religious obligation. In turn, Israel arms Azerbaijan to the teeth. But just as the Armenians are so entrenched in Iran that they have two reserved seats in Parliament and an observer on the Guardian Council, so there are far more Azeris in Iran than in Azerbaijan, and indeed Ali Khamenei’s father was Azeri.

Donald Trump wants to choose the next Supreme Leader, a choice that has probably already been made. We laugh at China’s desire to chose the next Dalai Lama, but this is even more ridiculous. Either Trump or Xi Jinping might hone the necessary skills by choosing a Primus of GAFCON, which would test anyone’s, since several of its African provinces do in fact ordain women all the way to the episcopate while maintaining an uncompromisingly conservative stance on homosexuality, yet Anglican clerical opposition to the ordination of women in the British Isles, North America, Australia and New Zealand is very largely homosexual and by no means uniformly celibate.

GAFCON seems to have pulled back in the way that we must hope and pray that the Society of Saint Pius X will. Its threat to consecrate more bishops is one of two great threats to the unity of the Catholic Church at this time. The other is the German Synodal Way. The bishops of Bangladesh have declined the Government’s new monthly honorarium and festival allowance for religious leaders, lest it subject the steadily growing Church there to undue influence in future. The rapidly declining Church in Germany needs to refuse the Kirchensteuer and call for its abolition, since it had given everyone who paid it the notion that they were entitled to a say on doctrine. Nothing is worth that.

Liberal Interventions

More joy in heaven, and all that. People who oppose this war after having supported most or all of the others are welcome aboard. But leadership must come from those who have been right all along. That said, this war has lost even The Economist: 

It is rare for one head of government to order the death of another. Yet on February 28th America’s president and Israel’s prime minister did just that, killing Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The decapitation of the Iranian regime reflects the devastating operational success of “Operation Epic Fury”. But Mr Khamenei’s place was immediately taken by a triumvirate. The next supreme leader could be named soon—perhaps his own son unless he, too, is killed. That augurs something more subtle and worrying: that the operation is failing to achieve its political goals.

It is naive to say, as some of Mr Trump’s cheerleaders do, that because Mr Khamenei was wicked (and he surely was), any sort of war makes sense. When you command a machine as lethal and overwhelming as America’s armed forces, united in this operation with the battle-hardened Israel Defence Forces, you have a special responsibility to define what you want to achieve. That is not only an ethical requirement; it is a practical one, too. War aims direct the campaign; they define the sacrifices the state imposes on its own people and the enemy; and they determine when the fighting should end.

In this war, Israel’s aim is clear: to demolish the threat posed by Iran’s regime. By contrast, Mr Trump and his cabinet have offered a mess of shifting assertions—about Iran’s missiles, nuclear weapons, regime change, following Israel’s lead, a “feeling” Iran was about to attack and settling scores after decades of enmity. Politically, vagueness gives Mr Trump room for manoeuvre. Strategically, his failure to say what Epic Fury is for is its biggest vulnerability.

The result is a split-personality war. One face is operational. America and Israel have destroyed Iran’s navy and grounded its air force. They are wrecking its missile capability and its arms industry and targeting the regime and its brutal enforcers. Dominance of the skies means that America and Israel can fight on at will. Interceptor missiles are meanwhile defending bases and cities in Israel and the Gulf countries, even as Iran strikes at more targets than it did during the conflict last June. So far, at least, there are enough interceptors to keep going.

The other face of this war is political, and it emerges from Iran’s strategy, which is about sowing doubt and confusion. To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime. So far, it is succeeding. Far from falling apart, it is rushing to escalate horizontally—a fancy way of saying it is lashing out in all directions. This has a number of consequences.. One is that other countries are being sucked in. Iran has attacked the Gulf states, which have bet their future on being havens from the chaos gripping the rest of the Middle East. Fighting has also erupted in Lebanon as Israel smashes Hizbullah, Iran’s main proxy. France and Britain will defend their bases from attack. On March 4th NATO air defences shot down an Iranian missile bound for Turkey.

Another consequence is economic. Iran has tried to shut the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off perhaps 20% of global oil supplies. It has also struck energy infrastructure, including the world’s biggest gas-liquefaction complex and Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery. The price of Brent crude is up by 14% since February 27th, to $83 a barrel. A megawatt-hour of natural gas in Europe costs €54 ($63), over 70% more than last week. As Asian buyers scramble for supplies, prices could go higher. The global economy could yet suffer a hit. If oil reaches $100 a barrel, GDP growth could be lowered by 0.4 percentage points and inflation raised by 1.2 points.

The third potential consequence is chaos inside Iran. Roughly 40% of its 90m people belong to ethnic minorities, including Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and Lurs. The Arab spring showed how countries can fall apart. America and Israel are putting pressure on the regime by backing Kurdish insurgents—a reckless idea that could end up stoking Persian nationalism or civil war. Mr Trump may not care about this, but he could not ignore the effects spilling over Iran’s borders into the Gulf states, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The risk is that Mr Trump cannot bear to quit so long as the markets and polls deny him the acclamation he craves—and that may last for as long as Iran can release even sporadic missiles and drones. Today barely a third of Americans favour the battle in Iran (90% backed invading Afghanistan in 2001). America may be an energy exporter, but its voters detest costly petrol. He may be tempted to seek an undeniable win by bombing the regime out of existence. But even with America’s military clout, he might not succeed. Meanwhile all those risks would continue to harm the region and the world economy.

Mr Trump would do better to narrow his war aims. His goal should be to degrade Iran’s military capabilities and then stop. He is almost there.

Some will argue that the job would be only half-done. Obviously, leaving the regime as a wounded beast would be heartbreak for the oppressed Iranian people. Even if Mr Trump wants peace, Iran could continue to lash out for a while, at least, revelling in its status as a symbol of anti-American resistance. The surviving regime may reject a nuclear deal—indeed, like North Korea, it may think a bomb is its only protection. If it rebuilds its nuclear programme, Mr Trump may have to strike again in months’ or years’ time. It is a bleak prospect. But it would be better for America to declare victory early than limp out of an unpopular war because of exhaustion.

These are the fruits of Mr Trump’s impulsive approach. Before this war, Iran’s regime was weaker than at any time in its 47-year history: it could have fallen without a single American bomb. Mr Trump may get lucky, but he is more likely to end up having to deal with regional chaos or a new hardliner. Surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, Mr Trump has become rash in his second term. His opportunistic grabs for power whenever he sees weakness are dangerous. America needs a strategy in Iran, just as it needs one in the world.

This war has lost even Bloomberg, where Andreas Kluth writes: 

It was bad enough that Donald Trump hasn’t been able to explain clearly why he yet again felt he had to attack Iran, and why now. His national security advisor and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, then inadvertently made everything worse by implying that the president wasn’t so much leading — in the spirit of America First and Peace through Strength — as following. Worse yet, Trump seemed to be following a foreign power, Israel. Accidentally, Rubio inverted Trump’s entire foreign-policy shtick: America Second, Israel First.

Here’s Rubio’s original statement: “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” That, Rubio said, was the “imminent threat”: not an Iranian strike out of the blue (which American intelligence wasn’t expecting) but an Israeli strike against Iran, against which Iran would have to retaliate.

In this narrative, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the one making the primary decisions about war and peace, life and death, while Trump and the American superpower had at best limited agency. Not a good look.

Here is how Senator Angus King, an Independent, put it when grilling a Pentagon official the following day: “Have we now delegated the most solemn decision that can be made in our society, the decision to go to war, to another country?” That, King said, was the “breathtaking” meaning of Rubio’s slip: “We’re going to be taken into a war by the prime minister of another country.”

Unsurprisingly, that narrative got under Trump’s skin. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he insisted to reporters, without elaborating. Rubio, for his part, appeared mortified to have caused embarrassment to his boss and backpedaled as energetically as he could, with a torrent of words that boiled down to: Whatever I said was misunderstood, and what I meant is whatever the president has said, is saying or will say.

But the damage was already done, and in different ways for different audiences.

One audience is Trump’s Republican base, which is generally tired of forever wars and no longer as reliably pro-Israel and Zionist as it once was. The president’s own MAGA movement subsumes Christian Nationalist elements that are downright anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, and want to weaken or sever America’s quasi-umbilical link with Israel. Rubio’s quote is grist for their mills.

More generally, conservatives have been drifting away from “dispensationalist” ideologies espoused by some evangelicals that see American support for Israel as biblically ordained, and toward an American nationalism that sees entanglements in the Middle East as no less problematic than anywhere else. Independents are also turning away from Israel, while Democrats have largely done so. Nobody in any of these groups will be reassured by Rubio’s version of a casus belli.

The episode also exposes a larger inconsistency in the Trump administration’s view of America’s alliances. Israel, with its martial prowess, is now considered a “model ally.” (That of course reminds other allies, in Europe and Asia, that they are not; Trump has long disdained most of them as free-riders, even if they are now rearming as fast as their welfare budgets allow.)

Even model alliances, however, suffer from a problem called moral hazard. In this context, the term means that smaller allies tend to take bigger risks if they are convinced that the US has their back, thus pulling both into unnecessary wars.

Try this for a thought experiment: Imagine that instead of Israel, which is right to feel existentially threatened by the Iranian regime, the ally in question is Poland, which is equally justified in fearing Russia, or South Korea, which lives in the nuclear shadow of the North. Would Trump be as enthusiastic in going to war against Russia and North Korea if he thought the Poles or South Koreans felt it necessary to strike preemptively?

The confused and mixed signals coming out of the administration about its latest war of choice send the latest of many terrible messages.

In opening hostilities, the White House ignored international law and the American constitution, which reserves to Congress the right to declare war. The administration didn’t even try to make a clear and compelling case to the public why this war had to happen now, or at all. It is now wasting ammo and resources in the Middle East that will be dangerously scarce in other conflict zones. And into this big mess it may have stumbled rather than deliberately stepped.

The bloodcurdling reality may be, as Senator King put it in that hearing, that Rubio inadvertently told the truth.

And this war has lost even The Atlantic, where Yair Rosenberg writes:

Why did President Trump decide to attack Iran? It depends on what day of the week you ask. On Saturday, the president claimed in a recorded address that he acted because Iran’s rulers refused to “renounce their nuclear ambitions” and were developing long-range missiles that threatened America and its allies. On Sunday, a senior administration official told reporters that Iran and its proxies “posed an imminent threat to U.S. personnel and allies in the region.” On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that Trump acted preemptively to protect U.S. forces in advance of an unavoidable Israeli attack on Iran that would inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against America. The next day, Trump rejected this framing, telling reporters that “if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand” because he believed Iran was “going to attack if we didn’t do it.” 

All of these pretexts present problems. Why would America need to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities if, as Trump previously claimed, they’d been “completely and totally obliterated” eight months ago in Operation Midnight Hammer? In 2025, the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that Iran’s missile program was a decade away from being able to target American shores. That hardly sounds like an imminent threat. As for the Israel excuse, Trump is the senior partner in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and he sets the terms. When he wanted Israel to end its June 2025 war with Iran, he publicly forced the country to recall its fighter jets, even without avenging a closing strike that had left four Israelis dead.

Trump could have dissuaded the Israelis once again. Instead, the president ordered the largest U.S. air-power buildup in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq. Then, according to The New York Times, his CIA gave Israel the intelligence to locate and kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. (Axios reported instead that the intelligence was Israel’s and the CIA confirmed it.) “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems,” Trump crowed on Truth Social, announcing Khamenei’s death. The two countries reportedly had planned the ensuing assault for weeks.

The shifting explanations for Trump’s war and the alleged imminent threat that prompted it suggest poor planning and internal confusion about the president’s motives. They are also a smoke screen. Fundamentally, a war ordered by the most powerful man in the world, commanding the most advanced military in the world, is the responsibility of the man who ordered it. Trump is a two-term president with agency, and he has long telegraphed and demonstrated his eagerness to use military force around the world—and in particular, in Iran. 

In 1980, NBC interviewed a young Trump about the ongoing Iran hostage crisis. He did not hold back. “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror, and I don’t think they’d do it with other countries,” he said. When the interviewer asked if that meant “you’re advocating that we should have gone in there with troops,” Trump replied, “I absolutely feel that, yes,” adding that had America done so, “I think right now we’d be an oil-rich nation.” (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that he had dreamed of being able to “smite the terror regime” in Iran for 40 years; it turns out Trump had him beat.)

In 1987, the Times reported that Trump declared in a New Hampshire speech that “the United States should attack Iran and seize some of its oil fields in retaliation for what he called Iran’s bullying of America.” In 1988, Trump told The Guardian that “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools.”

Trump’s instinctive hawkishness and abiding belief in military coercion as a solution to American problems extend well beyond Iran. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 intervention in Libya to topple Muammar Qaddafi, before turning against both. In his first term as president, Trump ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In his second term, he has fast-tracked arms sales to the Middle East, menaced Canada, threatened to “get Greenland,” and abducted the dictator of Venezuela.

Believing that Trump was somehow a “peace president” devoted to American restraint, as some credulous commentators claimed, required ignoring everything he’d said before he was president and everything he’d done after he became president. As Andrew Kaczynski, a CNN reporter who, during the 2016 presidential campaign, exposed Trump’s early support for the Iraq War, put it: “Important context for Trump’s opposition to regime change wars or interventions is that he never actually opposed them at the time and only did so after they went bad.”

Trump’s officials and allies have fumbled around to find an “imminent threat” to justify the president’s decision to strike Iran. But the real impetus for such action was Trump’s imperial approach to American power, which was decades in the making. The president specializes in exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents; having watched Israel decimate Iran’s proxy armies and air defenses over the past few years, he sought to capitalize on the regime’s moment of maximum vulnerability. Other countries—most notably Israel and Saudi Arabia—potentially stand to benefit from Trump’s war. But the decision to start it was his alone, and no amount of spin from his surrogates should obscure this fact.

The Company They Keep

On 27 November 2019, Jeremy Corbyn published the 451-page dossier that proved that the Conservatives were putting the National Health Service up for sale to the Americans. If you have forgotten the reaction, then you can no doubt imagine it. But today, the party of Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and Paul Corrigan is back in office, so that even in the FT, Laura Hughes writes:

A senior NHS official privately urged colleagues to add more patient data into a Palantir-built platform at the same time as he was being paid to advise the US technology company.

Matthew Swindells has been joint chair of four major hospital trusts in north-west London since April 2022 and has also since then acted as an adviser to Palantir through the now-defunct lobbying firm Global Counsel, which was co-founded by Lord Peter Mandelson.

Board papers for one of the trusts, Chelsea and Westminster, from the year when Swindells was appointed joint chair stated that he was “to be excluded from any decision-making in relation to Palantir”.

But in May 2024 Swindells told other senior NHS executives in an email that patient data from GPs in north-west London should be added to a platform Palantir has developed for the NHS.

“We should plan to flow patient level data in order to be able to drive automated workflows through the FDP,” he said. FDP is a reference to the Federated Data Platform, which has been developed by Palantir.

The company was awarded a £330mn contract in 2023 to create the FDP, which collates NHS operational data such as waiting lists, staffing, patient health, care and treatment information, and operating theatre schedules.

NHS England has said the FDP will not combine GP records from across the country. Such records, which contain the most complete picture of a patient’s long-term health, would turn the FDP from a hospital logistics tool into a more all-encompassing population health database.

NHS staff and medical trade unions have voiced concerns in recent years about Palantir’s suitability for providing data tools in national health systems, given it is best known for its ties to the security, defence and intelligence sectors.

Swindells’ email to senior NHS leaders in north west London suggested that the trusts “start by flowing aggregate metrics” from GP patient databases into the FDP before moving on to individual patient data.

He said officials had previously made other changes to a data platform used in north-west London, known as Whole Systems Integrated Care (WSIC), “without having to renegotiate all the data sharing agreements”.

Swindells said the GP patient data would allow “population health and quality research within WSIC and when we wanted to deploy it into a live operational environment, we would be able to drop it into the FDP”.

The recipients of the email included Penny Dash, now chair of NHS England, the body with overall responsibility for the health service in England.

NHS and GP patient information is stored across many different databases, with access to the data both locally within a certain region or on a national level strictly controlled by formal contracts.

The data agreements limit which medical records can be shared and for what purposes, as well as who they can be shared with. The contracts are intended to protect patient privacy.

Swindells told the FT: “The point I was making was about GP data being used in our local federated data platform which is under local data controllership, not about the national federated data platform.”

“The consideration was whether we could include GP data already in our local secure data environment for use only by local clinicians and managers for agreed operational purposes,” he said.

He added that “none of this has been actioned”.. NHS England said: “NHS organisations cannot upload confidential GP patient information to the [FDP] without first securing appropriate data sharing agreements from GP practices, NHS trusts and integrated care boards — and all data always remains under NHS control.”

Swindells was deputy chief executive and chief operating officer for NHS England until July 2019. He joined Global Counsel as a senior adviser in September of that year to “support its clients in health, health tech, life sciences and pharmaceuticals and advise clients in adjacent sectors”.

The 51-year-old was also a member of Palantir’s health advisory board from September 2019 until April 2022, when Swindells was appointed to the part-time role of joint chair for four north-west London hospital trusts.

He remained a senior adviser at Global Counsel until last month, according to his register of interests, when the company collapsed into administration in the wake of fresh revelations about Mandelson’s relationship with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Swindells said that in 2022 he had “also stopped supporting the GC [Global Counsel] contract with Palantir when I took on this role for the duration of the FDP procurement”.

He added that he returned to advising Palantir through Global Counsel after the NHS contract was awarded “and there was no risk of a commercial conflict, my declaration of interests reflects this, until I reduced my work with GC in August 2025”.

Swindells’ email was followed up the same day by Dash, who before her promotion to NHS England chair was serving as chair of the NHS North West London Integrated Care Board.

Dash said that she “had a chat with Matthew about this yesterday”, adding that then NHS England’s chief digital officer Ming Tang was “offering money” for Palantir and healthcare consultancy Carnall Farrar to “develop a popn [population] health tool within FDP”.

In his register of interests, Swindells declared that from February 2022 he was also an “internal adviser to Carnall-Farrar Healthcare strategy consultancy”, and in his latest register he states he is chair of the firm, a role he took on in April 2025. Some of the recipients of the emails pushed back against Swindells’ suggestions, saying they did not have the bandwidth and that information governance issues would need to be resolved if GP data were to flow into FDP, and that this would take a substantial amount of time to deliver. 

One wrote: “We are currently committed — as are the rest of London — to WSIC. To change that, we’d need substantial assurance that the FDP route will get there faster . . . at present, we don’t believe that is true.”

David Rowland, director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest think-tank, said: “The idea that the public interest can be protected simply by officials declaring and managing these conflicts behind closed doors is a nonsense.”

“The rules in this area need to be massively strengthened,” he added. “In the light of the Mandelson scandal, parliament needs to get a grip on the relationship between senior officials, lobbyists and private companies.”

Entrance to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital with people walking in front, including a man pushing a stroller and a child on his shoulders.

Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrats’ health spokesperson, said the revelations “will do little to build trust in a platform which has raised real concern in the health service about patient trust, data security, and NHS independence.”

Swindells told the FT: “I have been very open about my business interests outside of the NHS, and followed the NHS’s robust governance requirements carefully.

“I have also been very clear about my commitment to making sure our local communities, patients and staff get the maximum benefit from digital technology and data. That necessarily includes getting the most from the federated data platform which was procured nationally by NHS England.”

Palantir said: “Matthew Swindells has rightly made a clear public commitment to recuse himself from any commercial decision making in relation to the FDP, on account of other roles. The comments recorded in these exchanges are perfectly consistent with that commitment.”

Carnall-Farrar Healthcare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not that it ends there, as Nafeez Ahmed writes:

A Byline Times investigation has found that the three most prominent figures in Palantir Technologies, the AI data analytics firm at the heart of the intelligence used to justify US-Israeli strikes on Iran, have each publicly advocated for exactly the military confrontation that followed, with one describing it as an investment opportunity.

Palantir’s co-founders, Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, have both publicly argued that conflict with Iran is inevitable, with Lonsdale saying he was hoping to “invest in Iran” after a regime change.

Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, predicted war with Iran would prove the worth of the company’s autonomous weapons system.

This corporate position represents a profound conflict of interest. Palantir both informed the formal assessments that precipitated Israeli and US strikes in 2025, and is now profiting from the conflict as it provides real-time AI targeting to military operations by integrating classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence.

Palantir’s Intelligence Platform

Palantir’s MOSAIC platform has served as the analytical backbone of the IAEA’s Iran monitoring operation since 2015. The $50 million AI system processed approximately 400 million data objects, including satellite imagery, trade logs, metadata and social media feeds from inside Iran. It operated chiefly by making predictive inferences based on pattern analysis – a method critics have described as “Minority Report for uranium” and as “pretext fuel” for sanctions and strikes against Iran.

MOSAIC was derived from an older Palantir system already sold to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for its operations against Iranian-backed groups in Gaza and Lebanon – a lineage that raises further questions about the platform’s independence as a verification tool.

When MOSAIC flagged an apparent surge of enriched uranium at Iranian facilities between 6 and 12 June 2025, the platform’s assessment — that Iran was potentially weeks from producing multiple nuclear weapons — reportedly formed the basis of Israel’s intelligence against Iran.

The IAEA Board of Governors passed a non-compliance resolution on 12 June. Israel struck the following day. Trump then authorised strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, after which he claimed Iran’s capabilities had been “obliterated.”

However, when Tulsi Gabbard — Trump’s Director of National Intelligence – first testified to Congress three months earlier, she had confirmed that the consensus assessment of the US intelligence community was that Iran had not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003. Trump rejected that assessment.

Instead, according to The National Interest, no one in the US intelligence community was given the opportunity to probe the sourcing or verify the new intelligence presented to the Trump administration by Israel. By June, Gabbard had abruptly reversed her position, echoing Trump’s claim that Iran could build a nuclear bomb “within weeks”.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that inspectors have lacked access to key Iranian facilities for over eight months, preventing them from verifying whether nuclear material is being diverted for military purposes.

However, he said that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons programme: “We don’t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons.”

On Wednesday, a classified Iran briefing was delivered by White House officials to key Congressional and Senate representatives. According to Congressman Seth Magaziner, who attended the briefing, it showed that there was “no intelligence that Iran was planning to attack the United States”, and the administration has “no plan” for the war’s aftermath.

The war “was launched without any imminent threat to our nation”, said Senator Elizabeth Warren about information disclosed at the briefing.

The Case for Regime Change

Palantir’s dual role — as the analytical engine powering nuclear verification and, simultaneously, a strategic military partner of the US and Israeli Governments — represents a fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of the global non-proliferation architecture.

Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with its largest co-founding shareholder, Peter Thiel, in 2004, has been the most explicit advocate for military action against Iran.

In a CNBC interview in June 2025 during the 12-day war between Israel, the US and Iran, Lonsdale urged pre-emptive strikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure. He expressed confidence in American bunker-buster munitions, saying he had been told “they work” and that “you can always hit things multiple times just to be sure”.

Lonsdale described the country as one that “could be a prosperous republic if not run by crazy people”, and said he could not wait to “invest in Iran” after the anticipated regime change.

Palantir signed a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry in January 2024, committing the firm to providing technology for “war-related missions”.

Later that year, in an interview, Peter Thiel argued that every historical instance of nuclear acquisition by an adversary had produced a regional war, framing an Iranian nuclear weapon as a “catastrophe” requiring preventive action.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, has long framed the confrontation as part of a wider inevitability.

In an August 2024 interview with the New York Times, Karp said the US would “very likely” face a three-front war against Russia, China and Iran simultaneously – essentially a world war scenario involving the great powers. He argued that autonomous weapons systems, the kind Palantir builds, would prove decisive.

Commercial Incentives

Palantir’s stock has surged since the Trump administration took office, and its valuation now exceeds $300 billion.

The revelations in the Department of Justice’s disclosures that Peter Thiel retained a close business partnership with Jeffrey Epstein, despite his conviction for sexual abuse of minors, depressed the stock for several weeks.

But war with Iran has been good for the firm’s shareholders, its stock rising 7% in the first week of the conflict.

Palantir did not respond to request for comment.

The convergence of ideological conviction, commercial interest, lobby infrastructure and surveillance technology suggests that the Iran strikes may not represent the end of a regional crisis but the beginning of something larger.

If Karp’s three-front prediction reflects the operating assumptions within this network, the question facing policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic is not whether the conflict will widen, but when.

The Sweet, Pure Draft

That it all began in 1979 is the most Boomer assumption ever. But the slightly younger Michael Gove shows increasing and welcome signs of having become a neocon who had been mugged by reality. The word for that should be coined in The Spectator, where Tim Shipman informs us that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, had helped the United States to “frame their request” to use British bases to bomb Iran. How is that Knighton’s job? How is it even compatible with his job? His only medals are Jubilee ones, the Coronation one, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal, while there are no wings among his braids. In 38 years, his only combat tour has been as an engineering support officer in Italy during the Kosovo War. To have risen to his present eminence, appointed in the end by Keir Starmer of all Prime Ministers, he is obviously a spook, and thus steeped in the Five Eyes culture of being fed scraps by the Americans while yelping our gratitude at having been fed at all. As for the BBC, more people might be prepared to pay for it if it did not think that having a supporter of this war and a supporter of a harder war amounted to balance. It should learn from Fox News, where Senator Rand Paul writes:

Once war begins and American soldiers are under fire, a rational discussion of the pros and cons of war becomes nearly impossible. That is exactly why our Founders wrote a Constitution that demands a debate before the initiation of war.

But there was no debate in Congress, let alone a vote. On Feb. 28, Americans awoke to discover that their country was once again embroiled in a war in the Middle East.

Americans were not asked if they would bear the burdens of war. Instead, the American people were told, through a presidential eight-minute video posted around 2:30 in the morning, that the country was, once again, at war.

And because there was no national discussion about going to war, we do not know whether ground troops will be used. We have no idea how long the war will last. We have no idea who will lead Iran after the death of the supreme leader. And we have no idea how many casualties the American people are supposed to tolerate. We cannot know the answer to these questions because no one bothered to make the case that war with Iran was worth the sacrifice.

The Senate is only now debating whether hostilities should end after they’ve already begun. Before I discuss the merits of this war, I want to say that my prayers, and those of my family, are with the troops in the region, those in combat and anyone who may be called to serve.

I do not take lightly that combat has begun, that many have been severely injured, and that lives have been lost.

A debate and a vote in Congress provide the nation with the only opportunity to discuss whether the country understands and accepts the inevitable sacrifices of war, especially the loss of life.

It is because of those realities of war that the Constitution grants the power to declare war to the United States Congress — not one individual sitting in the Oval Office. Giving Congress the power to declare war was meant to prevent one person from committing the nation to war. When the nation goes to war, it should be a collective decision, with a clear rationale for war articulated. More importantly, a debate and a vote in Congress provide the nation with the only opportunity to discuss whether the country understands and accepts the inevitable sacrifices of war, especially the loss of life.

The people have been robbed of a public debate. Let me inform the public that this evasion is intentional.

The congressional leadership — resigned to their own irrelevance — will gladly hand the president the power to initiate war in exchange for plausible deniability. Congressional leaders want to make the case to voters that they are not to be held accountable at the ballot box because they played no role in the decision to go to war. That is not statesmanship. That is shameful.

This country is now at war, which has already cost the lives of six American service members, and many more are severely wounded. Those soldiers and their families deserved a public debate and a vote in Congress before the initiation of hostilities.

But had Congress debated war with Iran, we would have been wise to recall the words of John Quincy Adams, who, as secretary of state, advocated a foreign policy of restraint: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams argued, "there will America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

There is wisdom in Adams’ words, but his was not an original argument. It was George Washington himself who warned in his Farewell Address that America should stay out of the world’s endless conflicts.

Congress has tragically forgotten this advice. The history of the 21st century has been one of endless wars in which America perpetually searches for the next monster to destroy. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Venezuela, advocates for war tell us a country is a threat and that toppling a foreign government is a noble quest to protect security at home while spreading freedom globally.

While they have recycled their arguments — when they bother to make them — the results are always instability, chaos, suffering and resentment.

The Iraq War was launched under similar false pretenses, and the consequences of that fateful decision still reverberate throughout the Middle East to this day. The overthrow of Iraq’s secular government and the collapse of its civil society spurred some of the worst sectarian violence in modern history and directly led to the rise of ISIS.

More than a decade since the U.S. military intervention that toppled Muammar Qadhafi, and a year after the fall of Assad, these divided, unstable countries struggle to escape the cycle of violence and chaos.

And although Nicolás Maduro may have been removed from power by American military forces, the socialist and oppressive Chavista regime has not been removed from the Venezuelan government.

Most tragically, after two decades of war, the Taliban flag flies over Kabul.

America’s adventures have not produced the promised utopias — or even Jeffersonian democracies. 

History is replete with examples of wars that quickly escalate beyond their initiators’ intent. While some may think we maintain escalation dominance, the spiral of violence can rapidly get out of control.

America is at war. But Americans don’t want this war. They didn’t vote for it. In fact, they voted for just the opposite.

Beyond the documents and words of our Founders, that is why their intention to grant the power only to Congress is so important today.

If the president came to Congress to ask for authorization for war, the people’s representatives could do what they were elected to do: represent them.

Debate provides information and answers we do not now have.

The constitutional separation of war powers is not just some notion that belongs in our history books. It’s a vital part of a democratic republic. This Congress should be ashamed of how it has allowed this unilateral march to war.

No others in our history have been this cavalier with our military men and women and tax dollars as they are at this moment.

I urge my colleagues to join me in opposing both this war and the unilateral actions taken without congressional authorization, as the Constitution commands.

Justin Logan writes:

Baby Boomers should be remembered in domestic terms for enervating the U.S. economy with Total Boomer Luxury Communism. That generation vacuumed up current and future revenues to fund their luxe retirements, while young people struggle to find good jobs and homes while staring down a desolate future of debt and constraints.

President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is very much a Boomer foreign policy, and in a similar sense. The second Trump administration has lit small fires across the world and let them burn, while accruing the costs of putting them out well into the future.

It could be seen early with Venezuela. In September 2025, Trump began bombing Venezuelan small boats, first on the basis that they were to blame for the fentanyl crisis; this policy morphed into a larger campaign having to do with cocaine and the Maduro regime itself. Perhaps remembering his own rhetoric about regime-change wars, Trump had Gen. Dan Caine draw up a tactically excellent plan to snatch Nicolas Maduro and his wife and bring them back to the United States on drug charges.

This approach satisfied no one, but even so, the costs were low. The Miami crowd was upset Trump stopped short of installing Maria Corina Machado, going so far as to claim she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” to govern, despite her stand-in candidate having won in a landslide in 2024 after she was banned from running. For their part, the America Firsters were upset because the mission seemed like a Boomerish lark—an ’80s movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger taking on some moustachioed Latin dictator—that had little to do with how we live at home.

But Trump wriggled out of this by punting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced there would be three phases to follow: stabilization, recovery, and transition. This of course raised the question why Maduro’s former vice president and successor Delcy Rodriguez would help the United States move from phase two to phase three. She seems far more likely to pocket the gains from stabilization and recovery and put roadblocks in the way of transition.

But the costs of this policy resurfaced faster than Trump hoped. In a twist that should have surprised no one, Machado announced days ago that she would be returning to Venezuela in the coming weeks. The likely response of Rodriguez and former Maduro henchmen Diosdado Cabello and Vladimir Padrino should also surprise no one—they are going to seek to imprison her or worse. Then Rubio and Trump will be left with a decision: Do they let the regime in Caracas do with her what they will, or do they try to fight her into power? The costs of their January policy seemed so far away, but somehow they resurfaced within months.

Similarly with Iran. The president’s most profound foreign policy instinct is casualty-aversion. This is a noble and sensible sentiment. It also recommends a restrained foreign policy. Given that big foreign policy goals often incur a large butcher’s bill, those unwilling to incur big costs should avoid big foreign policies.

Not so with Trump. In Iran, the president has married grandiose ends to limited means. Perhaps knowing that the nuclear and ballistic missile arguments were duds, Trump threw a bit more spaghetti at the wall. Though he was at pains not to use the dreaded term “regime change,” Trump announced that “all I want is freedom for the [Iranian] people.” But freedom for the Iranian people is not going to arrive on the back of a Tomahawk.

That appears in The American Conservative, and my old editor on that magazine’s PostRight blog, Freddy Gray writes:

When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him.

The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era ‘forever wars’ are no more. Plus, these days the comedy communications come from the American Commander-in-Chief.

At the weekend, as missiles rained across the Middle East, Trump’s cabinet officials mostly avoided attention-grabbing interviews. The boss, however, embarked on his own heroic PR campaign. Taking questions from just about any reporter who happened to call, he launched a devastating series of pre-emptive strikes against any media narrative that threatened to make sense.

After the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei, intelligence sources intimated that the US had been cultivating a senior insider to take over the dictatorship, à la Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. But Comical Donnie promptly informed ABC that the attack on Tehran’s leadership compound had been ‘so successful it knocked out most of candidates… It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.’

Operation Epic Fury could go on for four to five weeks, he said. The mission was ‘ahead of schedule’, yet might go on ‘far longer’. Timelines are for losers. ‘Wars can be fought “forever”,’ Trump promised on social media in the early hours of Tuesday. ‘I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,’ he told the New York Post.

Team Trump usually delights in the President’s ability to set the media’s hair on fire. By Monday, however, after three US fighter jets were shot down in a friendly fire incident over Kuwait, it wasn’t just pompous liberals or conservative ‘panicans’ suffering narrative whiplash. Deep in the belly of Trumpworld, loud grumblings could be heard.

‘Off the record, there is no plan,’ said one former Trump official, during a Pentagon briefing presented by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. ‘They’re all completely freaking out,’ added another source who is close to the administration. ‘This could easily lead to nuclear war. Soon.’

America First insiders who oppose the Iran strikes know who they blame most: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. ‘Bibi forced [Trump] to do it,’ says the same source. ‘He didn’t want to at all.’

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA darling turned critic of Trump, declared: ‘We are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided by those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.’

Trump’s war allies are quick to dismiss ‘MTG’ and others as anti-Semitic cranks. On Fox News on Monday evening, Netanyahu laughed off the suggestion that he had ‘dragged’ the US President into a conflict: ‘That’s ridiculous. Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world.’ The next day Trump said: ‘If anything I might have forced Israel’s hand.’

Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his first significant statement since the bombing began, did seem to confirm that America launched Epic Fury because Israel was going to attack Iran regardless. ‘If Iran was attacked – and we believe they would be attacked,’ he said, ‘they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.’

Asked if that meant America had been forced to act because of impending Israeli action, Rubio equivocated: ‘Obviously, we were aware of Israeli intentions… but this had to happen no matter what… two things can be true.’

Which is more true, though? And whose war is it anyway? For the growing number of Israel-sceptics in America, and for those within the Make America Great Again movement who suspect that the President is putting the interests of a foreign country above his own, Rubio’s first answer is exactly the evidence they craved.

Others wonder what must be going through the mind of Vice-President J.D. Vance, an Iraq veteran and critic of neoconservative warmongering, who played a big part in the failed bid to resolve the Iranian question through diplomacy.

After an unusually quiet weekend, Vance popped up on Fox News on Monday, an hour before Bibi, to reiterate that America could never, ever allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. ‘There is just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight and no clear objective,’ he said. The Vice-President’s office declined to comment on an anonymous claim in the New York Times that, on 18 February, he’d advised the administration ‘to go big and go fast’ on any strike against Iran. Another source suggested that Vance had been ‘sidelined’. He said: ‘POTUS thinks he’s goofy.’

More hawkish insiders say Vance is sanguine about strikes, that American hostility towards the Iranian regime runs deeper than the ‘paleocon’ – i.e., anti-neocon – view allows, and that Trump understands the people far better than the wacky voices you hear on right-wing podcasts. That’s what the man himself believes, too. ‘I think MAGA is Trump,’ he told yet another journalist by phone on Monday. ‘And MAGA loves what I’m doing – every aspect of it… This is a detour that we have to take in order to keep our country safe.’

The word ‘detour’ is telling. It may be true that the patriotic impulse to crush freedom’s enemies runs deeper than any qualms about repeating the mistakes of Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. But the available polling suggests that the public opposed striking Iran, and parts of Trump’s 2024 coalition are already breaking away. Key figures of the Make America Healthy Again movement – though not its leader, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr – have begun a ‘Health not War’ campaign demanding that Trump seeks congressional authorisation on the Iran operation.

What Trump and Vance know but won’t say is that if the conflict cannot be resolved quickly, and if its consequences on the global economy can be felt as November’s midterm elections approach, the Republican party will suffer and Trump 2.0 could fall apart. And all the talk about Israel will become ever more toxic.

Matthew Parris writes:

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well.

My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten. I mean (he said) declining to do something foolish. On behalf of our country (he said), your husband politely declined Washington’s invitation to join the Vietnam war. That may have looked unmemorable: something we didn’t do. But had we done it the consequences for our country and our armed forces would have been huge.

Could it be in the nature of our present Prime Minister to make his mark on history, too, in the same way: by something he stopped us doing?

There is certainly a chance that America’s and Israel’s attack on Iran will in retrospect prove to have been right. But I think there is a greater chance it will not, and a fair chance it will prove a tremendous mistake. We British cannot stop it and should not even try to hinder it. But support it? Join it? No.

In my eighth decade, and my fifth in journalism, I feel a certain weariness, trudging rather than leaping into the fray. My newspaper, which supported the Iraq war, never discouraged me from setting out the case against, which I did with passion. I remember a fierce debate with The Spectator’s own Douglas Murray: his argument for intervention beating mine against, hands down, in front of a New York audience. I remember visiting Basra and describing for The Times the mess we had got ourselves into there.

I remember two visits to Afghanistan and many columns trying to explain the futility of intervention in that mad place. When the Syrian civil war came along I remember inveighing against British involvement on the grounds that we knew the monster we opposed but had no idea what monsters might replace him. And I remember making the same argument when we and the Americans went after Gaddafi in Libya.

And now here we go again. Am I simply wasting my breath reminding readers, once again, that you should not go into a war without a clear and feasible plan for getting out of it? That unless you know your way around the nest of competing forces within a country, and what may be unleashed if the great paperweight of a controlling monster is lifted, it can be counterproductive to wade in? Is it hopelessly ‘ideological’ to argue that revolutions are more likely to stick if they come from below rather than being imposed from above? Am I too pessimistic in fearing those eternal interlopers in domestic and international politics, random and unforeseen events? Reports of an accidental missile strike on a girls’ school right at the start are, if confirmed, a worrying augury.

Be in no doubt that Ayatollah Khamenei was a despot whose wickedness and brutality placed him in the very highest league of tyranny; that under him Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and terrorist proxies, posed a mortal threat to Israel and a simmering challenge to peace in the region. All true.

It’s not as if our participation would make any difference to the outcome, so why try to own the outcome?

But what if intervention fails? If the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ends up still on top, this would be a win for tyranny that will crush hope and stunt home-grown opposition for many years. And what if intervention succeeds, but leads only to chaos and perhaps civil war within Iran? It is this last possibility, which Washington strategists will surely have factored in as very real, that leads me to my final ‘what if?’.

What if Israel’s war aims are not the same as America’s? They may this week seem indistinguishable but as the situation develops a divergence may begin to show. America would presumably wish to see a strong, stable, peaceful Iran: the regional economic powerhouse that the country could be, and a dominant political power. Donald Trump says he wants Iranians to make their country great again.

Israel, however, will be content with mere chaos. Israeli strategists may even prefer it. Benjamin Netanyahu’s interests are well-served by simply smashing the place up. If this intervention leaves a critically weakened Iran in a state of semi-permanent turmoil, economic collapse, hostility from its neighbours and nascent civil war, that suits Tel Aviv fine. For the West, however, it does not.

Such thoughts leave me most uncertain that America is doing the right thing; but more certain that, whether or not this is the case, we British should stand back. It’s not as if our active participation would make any difference to the outcome, so why try to own the outcome?

Wilson and the British government were no supporters of Ho Chi Minh when we declined to join the US war effort. We hoped America would succeed but were (perhaps) unpersuaded that the Pentagon was wise and (certainly) unpersuaded that our own interests would be served by rallying to the interventionist cause.

So what should Keir Starmer do? Nothing. No grandstanding for or against the Americans. Keep repeating (if he likes) that Khamenei deserved his fate and the IRGC are an evil force. Pass up every opportunity to wish this American adventure well. Use discreet back-channels to let Washington know that it would save a great deal of unpleasantness for both sides if the Pentagon could manage the attack without using any British bases or (preferably) their base on our own (still) sovereign territory of Diego Garcia. This is what he seems to be doing.

Bold? No. Glorious? Hardly. But if there’s such a thing as Starmerism, this could be its moment.

And Justin Marozzi writes:

One word stood out in the florid and overwrought announcement of the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader by a tearful state-television newsreader on 1 March: ‘Leader and Imam of the Muslims, His Eminence Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, on the path of upholding the exaltation of the sacred sanctuary of the Islamic Republic of Iran, drank the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom and joined the Supreme Heavenly Kingdom.’

The dreaded ‘m’ word – martyrdom – immediately takes anyone familiar with Muslim history back to a legendary 7th-century battlefield in central Iraq. In 680, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali – regarded as the third Shia imam – faced a much larger army commanded by the Umayyad caliph Yazid I at the Battle of Karbala. He was routed, and he and his men slaughtered and decapitated. The battle entrenched the division between Sunni and Shia Islam and established the elevating narrative of martyrdom in the face of tyranny which courses through Muslim history, particularly Shia Iranian, like a river of blood.

Ancient history? Of course. Yet the past resonates powerfully in the Middle East as a living force shaping events in a way which outsiders, especially westerners, can find difficult to comprehend. Far from being a vaguely interesting millenarian curiosity, the Iranian tradition of martyrdom is absolutely key to understanding the latest conflict.

‘It’s the most significant aspect of the confrontation between Iran and the US and Israel,’ says Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. ‘Khamenei is going to go down in history as an iconic Shia leader who really followed the path of Imam Husayn.’ Never mind that this is the same man who only last month ordered the machine-gunning of many thousands of street protestors, some Iranians are already likening Khamenei to the saintly and widely revered Husayn.

While the comparison might shock – Pope Leo XIV has rather less blood on his hands than the Butcher of Tehran for starters – assassinating the Ayatollah during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan is like killing the Pope during Lent, Gerges says. ‘This will come to haunt the US and Israel for years. It will resonate in the Muslim imagination for centuries. It’s pouring gasoline on a raging fire.’

Charles Gammell, a former Foreign Office official and Iran expert, emphasises that the culture of resistance is ‘absolutely central to the DNA’ of the Islamic Republic. Venerating Khamenei now provides the regime – however spuriously – with ‘both religious and nationalist legitimacy to crack down on its people’.

The Husayn-Karbala-martyrdom narrative has sustained the Islamic Republic since its birth. In 1979, as the despised Shah prepared to flee into exile, Ayatollah Khomeini invoked the example of Husayn. He called on Iranians to rise up against a despotic regime led by ‘the Yazid of our time’. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war – of which Henry Kissinger memorably said, ‘A pity they both can’t lose’ – Iran’s fallen soldiers were hailed as ‘modern-day Husayns’ and the war itself a ‘new Battle of Karbala’. When, after eight years of fighting, Khomeini at last agreed to sign a ceasefire in 1988, he declared it worse than drinking from a poisoned chalice. ‘Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Unhappy am I that I still survive.’ Perversely, in his assassination Khamenei has now achieved the glory of martyrdom that eluded Khomeini.

But to what extent the theme of martyrdom can meaningfully sustain Iran in its hour of need is a moot point. ‘I think it’s overstated,’ says Ali Ansari, professor of Middle East history at St Andrews. While some Iranians may be happy to bite the bullet, the collapse of the republic into an economic basket case and inferno of repression means that fewer are queuing up for an accelerated pathway to paradise. The regime will only try to hang in there, exhaust the Americans and escalate in order to force a de-escalation because it doesn’t have any other options. ‘They have painted themselves into a corner so it’s fight or be killed,’ Ansari argues. ‘To paraphrase General Patton, they are keener on you being a martyr than themselves.’

So beyond Karbala, what next? Apart from the usual uncertainty about making predictions, ever shifting American objectives make the situation especially difficult to read. Donald Trump’s admission that the US had identified possible candidates to take over from Khamenei but that they had then been killed in the initial attack is not a ringing endorsement of finely tuned planning.

With hostilities already spreading ominously, the Gulf monarchies under fire from Iran and international energy prices surging, the pressure is on to force a conclusion. ‘If President Trump does not rapidly declare victory and return to talks with Iran, we should expect ratcheted escalation on both sides for the foreseeable future and probably an inconclusive outcome,’ says Nicholas Hopton, a former British ambassador to Iran.

There are also real fears that the war could spiral even further. Last year, in the wake of Israel’s strikes against Qatar, a senior adviser to Turkey’s President Erdogan warned: ‘To the dog of Zionist Israel… soon the world will find peace with your erasure from the map.’ Last month, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett claimed that ‘Turkey is the new Iran’. Belligerence is contagious.

The mood across the region, which has long provided fertile soil for conspiracy theories, is direr than ever. ‘Maybe the objective is chaos, to leave Iran without leadership, totally capitulated, as with what happened in Iraq,’ an Iraqi friend messages me. ‘Israel survives on a country like Iran being in chaos for the next ten years.’

Trita Parsi, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has a particularly stark response to those wondering how long the conflict will continue. ‘The question “How will this end?” should have been asked before this war was triggered. It wasn’t.’

Many Iranians, and much of the world, are fervently hoping that these are the dying days of the Islamic Republic. The tragedy is that, whatever happens, many more Iranians will drink the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom in the days ahead.

Kurds and Way?

We are still pretending not to be in a war that we obviously are. Is anyone going to ask Keir Starmer what Donald Trump’s war aims were, since we were tagging along even as we pretended that we were not? To take out the Supreme Leader? They just elected a new one, of course. To remove Iran’s nuclear weapons programme? Trump had already said that he had obliterated it days earlier, but that one is endlessly reusable, since no such programme has ever existed. To destroy Iran’s military capability? The destruction has been of a girls’ school.

Or to encourage the people to rise up and overthrow the regime? Trump is bringing in the Kurds. In the heady days of Early Corbynism, I used to have to dissuade youths from going to Syria to fight for them. Now it looks as if they themselves are going to be fighting for Trump in Iran, and that though it has tried to bomb Turkey while having to be reminded of Pakistan’s mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia. The Gulf monarchies were already on the same side as Israel. Now so are Turkey and Pakistan. That will no doubt do wonders for internal stability. The popular uprisings will be there. And in the United States. And, according to our own definition of these things, in Britain.