Murder Made Respectable

Paul Knaggs writes:

The Cock Crowed Six Times: John Healey Refuses to Say If US-Iran Strikes Are Legal

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” — George Orwell, 1946

That grim observation has found its most comfortable home in eighty years in the mouth of Britain’s Defence Secretary. On this first day of March 2026, as smoke still rises over Tehran and Iranian missiles strike at Dubai, Doha and Bahrain, we are witnessing the construction of a new world order, one in which international law is not a universal standard but a private convenience for the powerful, invoked loudly against enemies and whispered apologetically about allies.

On the morning of 28 February, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes across Iran in an operation the Israelis called “Roar of the Lion.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86 years old and the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East, was killed at his compound in central Tehran, alongside Iran’s Defence Minister, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and five to ten senior officials gathered for what intelligence had identified as a deliberate target of opportunity.

The decision to strike, according to a senior US defence official, was accelerated, the timeline brought forward. More than 200 civilians have been reported killed. Iran says one strike hit an elementary school and killed over a hundred children. Trump, overseeing proceedings from Mar-a-Lago, announced it was all going “ahead of schedule.”

When John Healey was asked on Sunday morning whether this was legal under international law, he refused, six separate times, to say. “The straight answer to the question of, is the US action legal? That is for the US to set out and explain. It is not for me, as Defence Secretary of the UK.” 

A masterpiece, as Orwell would have recognised, of political language.

The Geometry of Selective Outrage 

Let us be precise about what has happened here. Under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, states are prohibited from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state. Two exceptions exist: self-defence under Article 51, or Security Council authorisation. Neither has been formally invoked. A head of state has been killed by a foreign military at his desk, in his office, during the early hours of a Saturday morning, on the basis of intelligence and a “target of opportunity.”

For four years, the Ministry of Defence has been remarkably clear-eyed about the law when Russian aircraft violated Ukrainian sovereignty. Ministers did not defer to Moscow’s own legal reasoning. They did not suggest it was “for Russia to set out and explain.” They called it what it was: illegal, unprovoked, a violation of the UN Charter. Their clarity is stated as correct and welcome, there is no dissent from the government line.

Now, when the missiles carry a Western return address and the dead man wore a turban rather than a uniform, the law has suddenly become a private matter for the aggressor to justify. Healey himself told Sky News that “few people will mourn” Khamenei, characterising the Iranian regime as “a source of evil.” That sentiment may be widely shared.

It is also entirely beside the point. International law was built precisely for moments when moral certainty runs highest, when the powerful feel most justified in appointing themselves judge, jury and executioner. Its purpose is to restrain that impulse, not to excuse it.

The character of a victim has never been, and cannot be, the legal test for whether his killing is lawful.

The Silence Behind the Statement

What makes Healey’s non-answer more than merely evasive is what it implicitly confirms. In the days before the strikes, the British government formally refused Washington’s request to use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for offensive operations against Iran. The reason, according to multiple reports citing government sources, was a legal one: Britain’s own Attorney General, Lord Hermer, had advised that facilitating the strikes would breach international law. The Times reported at the time that the government was specifically concerned that international law “makes no distinction between a state carrying out the attack and those in support if the latter have knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act.”

That advice was clear. The government accepted it. Starmer held the line, and was applauded in some quarters for a rare act of principled independence. 

Then Iran began firing back, and the line dissolved.

By Sunday, with Iranian missiles striking Dubai, Doha, Bahrain and targets across the Gulf, Starmer reversed course entirely. He announced that the United States had requested permission to use British bases for what he described as “specific and limited defensive purposes,” namely to destroy Iranian missile stores and launch systems at source, inside Iranian territory. He had decided, he said, to accept that request. The framing was careful. The word “defensive” was doing an enormous amount of work. Bombing missile depots inside a sovereign country with which you are not at war has rarely been described, in any legal tradition, as a purely defensive act.

The question this raises is not simply one of consistency, though the inconsistency is glaring. It is a question of what changed. The legal advice had not changed. The UN Charter had not changed. What changed was the pressure: from Washington, from the right-wing press, from a conflict now sprawling across the region and threatening British personnel. Starmer did not announce a new legal basis. He announced a new political calculation.

There is one further irony that deserves to be spoken plainly. For the better part of two years, Keir Starmer and his ministers repeated a single phrase with the regularity of a metronome: Israel has the right to self-defence. It was offered in response to questions about civilian casualties in Gaza, about the destruction of hospitals, about the cutting of food and water supplies. Whatever the action, whatever the scale, the answer was the same. Israel has the right to self-defence.

By that logic, so does Iran.

Iran has now had its head of state killed, its military leadership decapitated, and its capital bombed. Whatever you may think of Khamenei’s rule, whatever crimes may be laid at the regime’s door, a country that has suffered a strike of this magnitude has, under Article 51 of the very same UN Charter Starmer has cited repeatedly, an arguable right to respond. The government cannot invoke the right of self-defence as an absolute and universal principle when applied to one state, then fall silent on it entirely when applied to another. If the principle is real, it applies in Tehran as it applied in Tel Aviv. If it does not apply in Tehran, then perhaps the government should revisit how freely it was dispensed elsewhere.

Healey, who could not bring himself to comment on legality when asked directly on Sunday morning, found himself by Sunday evening presiding over a policy that the government’s own lawyers had, a week earlier, considered a potential breach of international law. He will not confirm what legal advice was taken. He will not say whether it changed. He can tell us that “few will mourn.”

We are being offered moral opinion as a substitute for legal judgment, which is precisely what Orwell meant. The lies are being made to sound truthful. The murder is being made to sound respectable.

Lord Frost, no fellow-traveller of this publication, put it plainly on Sunday morning, before the U-turn had even arrived: “It is obvious that the Starmer government does not support these strikes and does not think they are within international law. They are trying very hard to avoid having to say so.” He was right about the first part. The second part has since been confirmed, not by a declaration of principle, but by a quiet capitulation dressed up as a defensive necessity. When a Tory peer offers a more intellectually courageous position than the Defence Secretary, something has gone badly wrong. When that position is then validated by the government’s own subsequent behaviour, something has gone wrong that cannot easily be repaired.

The Precedent That Follows 

Critics will argue, correctly, that Iran’s regime has been murderous, destabilising and hostile to the people of the region. That is not in dispute. Iran has backed proxy militias across the Middle East, executed thousands of its own citizens, and funded terrorism on British soil. These are facts, not propaganda.

But here is the logic that the cheerleaders for this strike must be prepared to follow. If the United States may kill a foreign head of state because it deems him malign, without Security Council authorisation and without a declared state of war, then that principle does not stop at Tehran. Russia has made identical arguments about Ukrainian leadership, about “Nazis” and “threats” to its security. China makes comparable claims regarding Taiwan. The “rules-based order” the West claims to defend is not rules plus some discretion. It is rules, or it is nothing at all.

As China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it, the strikes represent “the blatant killing of a sovereign leader and the incitement of regime change.” Vladimir Putin called it “a cynical murder.” We may feel considerable discomfort sharing a position with either man. But their descriptions of what has legally occurred are not wrong simply because of who is saying them.

What Britain Is Choosing

Britain is not being asked to condemn Israel or America. It is being asked whether international law applies equally to all states. That is not a radical question. It is the foundational question of the post-war order that Britain helped construct.

Healey’s position suggests the answer is no, but that he would prefer not to say so directly. That is not diplomacy. It is what Orwell called “the defence of the indefensible,” conducted in language that sounds like a measured position while meaning none at all.

There is a regional war spreading across the Middle East today. Iranian missiles struck Dubai this morning. Qatar is under fire. American soldiers are dead. Three hundred British troops came within a few hundred yards of being killed at their base in Bahrain. The consequences of this action are unfolding in real time, and Britain’s government cannot bring itself to form a view on the legal framework within which it occurred.

That is not neutrality. It is abdication, and it will have consequences of its own, for the next time Britain stands at the dispatch box and invokes the UN Charter against a less favoured aggressor.

Law is not a tool to be picked up against enemies and set down for allies. The moment it becomes that, it ceases to function as law at all.

Justice, as Orwell understood, is not a private explanation offered after the missiles have landed. It is a public standard that must be applied before they are ever launched. The question for this government is a simple one: does the rule of law bind the powerful, or does it not? Britain’s silence is already an answer.

“If the law only applies to our enemies, it is not a law at all. It is a leash, and right now, we are holding the wrong end of it.”