We’re helping Iran’s hated ayatollahs

I’M REALLY not sure why we are trying so hard to pick a fight with Iran. Is it the same twits who got us into a needless war with Iraq and created permanent chaos in Libya and Syria, at work again? The clash in the Strait of Hormuz was obviously connected to our strange seizure of an Iranian oil cargo off Gibraltar, a superpower action we aren’t really strong enough to take on our own.

The thing I learned from my one visit to Iran is that the horrible fanatics who control that country rejoice in Western enmity. Millions of Iranians are friendly to the West and long to be on good terms with us. But their hardline rulers believe that war and sanctions give them the excuse to prolong a largely despised regime. They threw my friend Jason Rezaian into solitary confinement on ridiculous spying charges to punish him for trying to improve Iran’s relations with the West. Yes, you read that right. So whenever we stir up this sort of trouble, we are actually helping the ayatollahs stay in power.

Do the Iranians have any grievances against us? Well, yes, they do. In 1953, the British MI6 agent Monty Woodhouse, later Tory MP for Oxford, helped mount a putsch in Tehran, ‘Operation Boot’. This overthrew the closest thing to a democratic, constitutional ruler Iran has ever had, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The records of this nasty, corrupt, violent episode have been published. Many democratic-minded Iranians still resent this, as well they might.

And we also just happen to owe Tehran £450 million (an impartial international court ruled against us on this in 2009) for tanks ordered by the Shah in the 1970s. We were paid up front. But we never delivered most of them because we did not like the new Islamic Republic. Instead, we sold quite a few of them to Saddam Hussein, against whom we would later go to war – a pretty good illustration of what a stupid mess our foreign policy is these days.