Suspected terrorists do not get bail. So that’s that. According to the fabled farmer, the Police have not contacted her to ask what she saw, but there were between eight and 10 men in the woods near RAF Fairford, yet only five have been arrested. If those London boys from central casting had been caught redhanded with explosives in that vicinity, then they would have been charged by now. But if their hands were red, then it was from red diesel, although their oil drums were empty, so they must not yet have contributed to the 120 per cent increase in fuel theft from farms compared to last year, with 8000 litres of diesel stolen in March from a farm only 24 miles away.
Such crimes result in no small measure from Donald Trump’s war, but any other attempt to pin this on Iran has been laughed out from Tehran to Tetbury, so while it cannot be ruled out in what was already the beleaguered Gloucestershire Constabulary, regime change in Iran seems most unlikely to follow from this even indirectly. Regime change to what? There are two realistic possibilities. One is the weirdest political cult in the world, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq). That has been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population was under 30, yet the longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim was to install it in Tehran, so the Americans relocated it to Albania between 2013 and 2016. It remains there, not without local resistance, while also maintaining a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.
Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden’s, Bush’s and Blair’s Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn. Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But these people really did and do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet they were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.
The other possibility is Reza Pahlavi, hitherto a ridiculous fantasist supported by almost no one else in the world apart from a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles. But the cause of Henry Tudor was ridiculous once. We now know that the Whig magnates were in constant contact with the Jacobite court in exile, just in case. Bourbon and Bonaparte Restorations were romantic fantasies until they happened. People scoffed at the Eastern European governments in exile in London until they were installed in their own capitals. Why, the overthrown Tsar of Bulgaria even came back as Prime Minister. And here we are.
Rajavi is most put out. Using her stage name, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, she alleges that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been infiltrating demonstrations and shouting for the Shah, or else overdubbing recordings of demonstrations in those terms and circulating them on social media. In every case of the former, says Rajavi, the real demonstrators have responded with her own slogans of opposition both to the Supreme Leader and to the Shah. Like the Eskandari founders of the Tudeh Party, she is a member of the Qajar dynasty that reigned until the Pahlavis overthrew it in 1925. As was the great Mohammad Mosaddegh, but that does provide some context.
In calling for Pahlavi himself to run Iran, all the old munchers of freedom fries are now advocating an absolute monarchy. The hardest British republicanism is among the Blairites. Such are the centrists who, agreeing with the populist Right in principle as they usually do, are also cheering on the war against Iran. They think that monarchy is backward, as any American or Israeli politician or commentator does axiomatically. And like those, they think that Iranians want and need a monarchy, albeit one that turned 100 only last December and which reigned for all of 54 years in the vast sweep of Persian history. Remember, though, that it is we who have doubts who are the racists.
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