Is the UK at war with Iran or not?

0:28When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. This is a Global Player original podcast. But the only way to stop the threat is to destroy the missiles at source, in their storage depots or the launchers which are used to fire the missiles. The United States has requested permission to use British bases for that specific and limited defensive purpose. We have taken the decision to accept this request, to prevent Iran firing missiles across the region, killing innocent civilians, putting British lives at risk and hitting countries that have not been involved. That is the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, with a change in position from the UK government.

1:2824 hours ago, ministers were saying that no UK military assets were being used to aid the American intervention in Iran. 24 hours on, they are now. But nevertheless, Donald Trump has expressed deep disappointment with Britain's response. So are we backing this intervention in Iran? And might we get dragged still further into it? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:59the news agents it's john it's lewis and even since we did our special episode yesterday this intervention this war on iran feels as if it is intensifying changing minute by minute hour by hour and is expanding across the region so just a quick update we're recording this about one o 'clock in the afternoon london time on monday where we're at new iranian strikes have been reported in Saudi Arabia. There's an oil refinery on fire there. The price of gas on the economic front, petrol on the international markets has risen sharply. At one point, it's up 42%. That's crude oil. The US and Israel, as we know, struck Iran on Saturday, killing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

2:42The Israeli military saying it's launching new strikes in Tehran. In Kuwait, several US fighter planes have crashed in what the US military say was an apparent friendly fire incident. Perhaps most importantly of all, the United States has confirmed that now four members of its military were killed in Iran's initial attacks. It did not say where. The first body bags for American families will be heading back to the United States. That is generally something that Donald Trump has not had much experience of, because although, as we were saying yesterday, he has become far less cautious in pulling the trigger on military action around the world to achieve his foreign policy aims generally speaking he is not keen certainly on putting troops in harm's way and yet now for american soldiers and trump himself has said there will likely be more to come well there is a very striking piece of video and remember what a visual president donald trump is and he loves to have the visuals to go with his story of great success over the kuwait skies there is an f-16 fighter jet spiraling to the ground having been hit by fire and the pilots are parachuting to safety and watching that you think it's the most literal question of is this spiraling out of control in that i think that there was a calculation at the pentagon of what the response was likely to be from Iran.

4:16And it has been far wider, covering many more countries. The RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus hit last night by a drone. Apparently sirens were blaring again today on Cyprus. We've already seen what's happened in the Gulf, where there's been a huge disruption to kind of airline traffic and the movement of freight, because so many of the airports there are closed and the airspace is closed. So this is going far wider, I think, than America anticipated. And as you say, there will be body bags coming home to the Dover Air Base in Delaware, which is where the repatriation ceremonies take place. And that is not what Donald Trump wants.

5:01I'm sure he was hoping that you could have a decapitation strategy. Just like Venezuela. Just like Venezuela. And there's a really interesting interview that I've seen that he's given to ABC and to Jonathan Kyle there, where Donald Trump more or less says, you know, there were some leaders that we kind of thought we could do business with. But we were so successful with the decapitations strategy that we've killed them as well. And you think, OK, this was never about democracy coming to Iran. It was replacing one hard man with another, but hopefully a hard man who would be more sympathetic to the United States and Israel than Khamenei.

5:42And so you think, well, what is the American strategy? What does the end of this look like? Well, I think what we're seeing, even as I say, by comparison to when we spoke yesterday, is this U.S.-Israel attack turning into a fully blown regional conflict. And that was something that the powers there had feared or some of the powers there had feared and counselled against. I mean, if you just think now about the sort of number of countries where attacks have taken place, I mean, we saw something that's been condemned by the US and the Gulf states. You know, what they're saying is indiscriminate and reckless missile and drone attacks from Iran.

6:19Those include Bahrain, Iraq, the Kurdistan, a special region of Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, major new front in the war started by Israel and US on Saturday. And we've also seen Hezbollah launching missiles and drones towards Israel in response to themselves. As you say, John, we're seeing even conflict take place or perhaps anticipation of conflict in the Aegean Sea, Cyprus, Greece sending frigates. You know, you can just see in just 24 hours, this is cascading and cascading and cascading. And it is inevitable, therefore, and I think this is the shift that we were just talking about with Keir Starmer.

7:00Britain's position on Sunday could no longer really hold even as of Monday because the difference now is now we're seeing the sort of full weight of the retaliatory strikes from Iran and its proxies not just on United States military assets but on British other British allies in the region where we ourselves have assets. then the question Keir Starmer is saying has become different. It's not whether we are supporting the United States and Israel in their offensive capacity. It's whether we are going to support them and our other allies in a defensive capacity against Iranian aggression. And that's a new position that Starmer is taking.

7:40So, you know, to explain the logic, and there is a logic to Starmer's position, it is we will now support our bases being used. So Diego Garcia, and we need not get into the whole debate over the Chagos Islands about this, but Diego Garcia can be used by American aircraft to launch strikes on missile launchers in Iran, but not to take out infrastructure or to target individuals. You know, the decapitation strategy that we saw on the first day. So, yeah, if you're going after missile launchers, fine, but we're not blowing up parts of Tehran willy nilly. And that is the line that has been drawn.

8:22This is the new position that the British have taken up. But it's a nuanced position. And so it's already brought accusations from the Greens that you're sliding towards war. And this is Iraq 2.0. And you've got Farage and Kemi Badenoch saying, well, fine, but you're a coward and you haven't gone far enough. And so, you know, it looks like Keir Starmer's had a bit of backbone, but not enough to either say yes or no to America on this. It is true, as we were saying yesterday, that Starmer and the British government have been a little less full-throated in some of its support than, for example, even the Australians or the Canadians or the Germans.

9:04I mean, the German Chancellor Mertz is sort of overnight basically saying we're not going to lecture our allies about doing something that we don't have the capacity to do. But in the long term, you know, if it's good for the region and good for the West, then so be it. And I do understand that. And as I said yesterday, I did think, you know, the Defence Secretary's rather strangled kind of response to all of this, refusing for us to say whether we even think it's a good idea or not, or something that we back one way or the other. I can see why lots of people think that's pretty risible. In defence of Starmer, in terms of the change in position, I do see the logic of it.

9:36I can see the logic of it. I don't think that there is much in the sort of green accusation that inevitably this means we're going to be party to a kind of Iraq 2.0. I mean, what's Starmer to do in this situation? If you've got Iranian missiles flying at potentially British targets or other allies' targets, you're potentially going to have civilians killed as a result. What are we supposed to do? because of the kind of understandable hangups and legacy of the Iraq war and his, I think, understandable concerns about the legality of some of these questions, he's supposed to just go, no, let's leave it.

10:10Now, I agree with you, John, that, you know, Trump, this is a sophisticated argument and Trump isn't necessarily going to see it. Indeed, we've seen in this interview that apparently he's done with The Telegraph that Trump has told The Telegraph that he is, quote, very disappointed in Keir Starmer for blocking him from using Diego Garcia to carry out strikes in Iran. He said that Keir Starmer took far too long to change his mind, 24 hours, but nonetheless. And that's probably, he says, never happened between our countries before, adding it sounds like he was worried about the legality, as if it's some sort of trifling question, which, you know, as we've said many times, just reflective exactly of how Trump sees the world.

10:47And that's very different to how Starmer sees the world. So I think, you know, Starmer's getting it in the neck on all sides on this, which I can sort of understand. But I also sort of think he's ended up in the only position, one of the only positions that he might have done. Look, Britain has said no to America before. I mean, most notably when Obama wanted to attack Syria over their use of chemical weapons and Parliament voted no. When Ed Miliband was the leader of the opposition and he kind of said, we're not going to support this. And David Cameron lost the vote. Obama was left high and dry.

11:19And that didn't take place. The Vietnam War. Harold Wilson refused to lend his support to the Americans and saying we're staying out of this. Well, the corollary of Kemi Badenow's position rather than Farage's position is basically that we should always support the Americans no matter what. No matter what they ask of us and no matter what they say and no matter what they're doing and no matter how egregious it is. I'm not saying this is egregious or not but I'm just saying in principle basically what they're saying is we should always back them. And I don't think that's a very satisfactory position for a UN permanent member of the Security Council not least a member, not least a country with any sort of self-respect.

11:54I also think just from the Green Party point of view that, look, they're riding high after the by-election last week and, you know, rightly so. But I do think on questions of defence and on NATO, they are pretty vulnerable because it seems that never right to get involved in anything. And then you think, well, what is Britain's defence for? And the world does look like a more uncertain place. And I think that the British people, if they studied closely those policies or where the Green Party stands, might find themselves thinking, no, this isn't right. Well, this isn't looking after our national security.

12:30Well, the other thing is, from Starmer's point of view, I mean, who knows? We don't know what the Americans have said to them privately about what the end game of this is, what the objectives of it are and kind of what Trump wants to achieve. Perhaps they have presented behind the scenes, you know, a very detailed kind of agenda and prospectus and plan about what the objectives are and where they hope it will go. It feels unlikely, right? It feels unlikely. So I can imagine if you're sat in Downing Street and you're basically being asked for carte blanche to use British military assets, initially in an offensive capacity, for an objective where, let's be frank, the end game remains opaque at best.

13:12You would have questions and you would be worried about where it would go. I mean, let's be honest. I mean, we sort of got into this a bit yesterday. You can absolutely welcome, as many on the right are doing, the downfall of the Ayatollah. you can absolutely hope and want this regime to fall because it's a murderous regime which is not a friend of ours has been responsible for terrorism in the uk and is no friend of the west etc etc etc it's also true to have in your head that it's very clear from trump that he has no plan that he has no plan he said himself he's posited the idea maybe this will go on for weeks it might be over tomorrow who knows like are we really going to hitch our wagon to such an imprecise unclear but nonetheless potentially seismic set of events because which basically boils down to let's be honest Trump has got the wind at his back over military intervention and he's rolling the dice because it makes him feel big that's basically what this is about right and we're already seeing we've already described the unknowable and unpredictable consequences this has started now We can't know how it will finish just on the economic front alone.

14:19And this also makes me think that Trump could easily just back down. Qatar Energy saying in the last 10 minutes since we've been sat here, they're going to stop the production of LNG, which is sending gas prices soaring up 50 percent on the day already. And Trump, presumably, if we start to see a massive oil price, which has happened as a result of Middle East intervention before or gas prices around the world, liquefied gas prices going up around the world. You can totally imagine Trump just turning around going, OK, that's enough now. Don't like this. That's what we're dealing with. That's how mercurial he is.

14:50Yes. And we know about the state of the US economy and how the Democrats are making hay with the whole question of affordability. If gas prices go up, if the price of a barrel of oil goes up, as it has done of Brent crude and American oil prices also gone up, then that's going to hit people at the pumps when they're filling up their cars in America. and America is the car economy. The American people are going to hate it if their prices have gone up because of Donald Trump's war. I agree with you. I think there are two really interesting areas of miscalculation on both sides. I think there's been miscalculation on the American side that once you get rid of the leadership, the regime will fall.

15:28And I just think that if you look at the structures that were put in place by Ayatollah Khomeini back in the end of the 1970s, actually preservation is everything and the people who will decide who will be the new leaders of iran are people that have been appointed by khamenei and are already kind of loyal to him and his vision of what iran should be so i think that's a miscalculation and the other thing is exactly as you say there is the possibility that donald trump gets bored and thinks oh god this isn't going well let's stop this let's go focus on something else but the other thing is if it does go on for weeks, have America got the munitions needed to sustain this level of bombardment?

16:12And so if Iran is playing it long, Iran might just have the right calculation. Where Iran seems to have screwed up is going after these frontline Gulf states, which has not led to the Gulf states, you know, putting pressure on America to stop. It's infuriated them. And now they want to go over to Iran. But we have just heard in the past few moments, I've just kind of been told in my ear that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has been speaking. The war secretary. The war secretary. Let's listen to what he had to say. To the media outlets and political left screaming endless wars. Stop. This is not Iraq.

16:47This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better. And so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb. And he's right. this is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes. This is kind of what I mean. We're sat here. And again, this is why I go back to sort of Starmer. I can understand Starmer's ambivalence about what to do and which sides to come down on. Because even if we think about like the justifications that have been put forward for this, in the last 48 hours.

17:31And there have largely been two, right? One is, oh, we need to make sure that they don't develop a nuclear weapon. I'm sorry, I thought 12 months ago we were told by the Trump administration that they'd obliterated their nuclear program. That was the case, as far as I knew, until basically two weeks ago. And now the administration and the Israelis are turning around and going, actually, maybe it wasn't quite as effective as we thought. We definitely need to go after them now. So what's the end point there? is the objective to actually destroy those sites, in which case, why do you need to kill the Ayatollah and the rest of the leadership?

18:02And if it's therefore about something bigger than that, which Trump has also said it is, it's about regime change. Well, it's all very well for Pete Hexith to stand there and go, well, this isn't like Iraq and nation building. But there's a reason that George Bush went into Iraq with boots on the ground, as did Tony Blair and other Western powers in other liberal interventions of the late 90s and early 2000s, because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to affect regime change from the air. The only alternative or the only theory that I've heard as to how you get to both regime change and you get to disarming them permanently is basically the Trump idea that you kill some of the leadership, you bomb some of the military, and then the Iranians will magically rise up and seize their country.

18:47It's over to you now. Well, that's easy to say. That's easy to say if you're sat in Pennsylvania Avenue in the safety of Washington, D.C. Much harder to actually do if you're facing, if you're a young dissident or, you know, someone who really hates the regime in Iran, but you're facing one of the most well-armed militias embedded across one of the most vast, complicated countries in the world. Look, I won't sit here, John, and claim I'm no expert on Iran. Very few people are, right, in the West because it's such a closed and yet complicated society. But I would not possibly dare to sit there and imagine and believe that just because I dropped some bombs that that would or indeed even should happen.

19:27And yet I'm also willing to say that I don't think that those sat around the White House are particularly expert on Iran either and yet seem to have come to the conclusion that that is likely to happen. I just think a lot of this stuff is just fantasy. Yes, I agree. And I think it was very striking there that Hegseth said this was about no nukes, no missiles. That's what we're doing in Iran. Well, hang on. We had been told this was the chance for the people to rise up. And it was about regime change. And if you're going to change the regime, you're building a new nation, whether you like it or not.

19:58Look, Colin Powell, when he was secretary of state in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, says to George W. Bush, this is pottery barn rules. If we break it, we own it. I that's the kind of slogan of this chain of stores in America called pottery barn, where if you break something in it, you have to pay for it. And, you know, Donald Trump is sure as hell is going to break something in Iran because we can see that they've decapitated the leadership. There has been an extensive campaign of bombing. But what then? Either the regime just survives, in which case it carries on, but it's just got a new leader.

20:35Or there is civil war or there is an uprising that is crushed. So I think for Pete Hegseth to say we're not involved in any of this is fantasy. Or possibly that you get some new leadership in Iran, which makes a deal. And maybe that will happen. But again, the administration is not being clear what the contours of that deal would be. And hard. I mean, I suppose Trump could do it because he changes his mind on everything. But I mean, you know, moving from there needs to be fundamental regime change that people should rise up to having a new Ayatollah, basically the old regime, but with a new face or a new, it won't be a new face, but a sort of slightly less well-known face that emerges.

21:13Again, even that is a transformation from where the White House is right now. So, again, I am not surprised that European leaders find themselves both irrelevant, but also find it almost impossible to manage because the actual objective of this and the ideas behind it and the principles appear to shift and change and mutate hour by hour. and that is something that although America has been highly interventionist in the world before, although it's got himself involved all over the world before, sometimes it's brought a lot of bad, sometimes even evil, to different parts of the world before. There's been nothing like this in the sense that each and every of those occasions, whether it was where you agreed with it or disagreed with it, the principles were clear and reasonably consistent on a time frame of, at the very least, month to month, year to year, not minute by minute or hour by hour.

22:02Lewis, let us hope you are right that Donald Trump has spoken to Starmer and Macron and there is a clear plan and a strategy that is going to unfold. And there is a whole considered kind of process that will unfold in the coming weeks and months. But I doubt it. We'll be back just after the break.

22:26From a range of trusted voices and award winning journalists. Good morning, I'm Nick Ferrari. It's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. The United States military began major combat operations in Iran. You must lay down your weapons or face certain death. The global question, why has Donald Trump bombed an enemy that he said had been completely vanquished last year? And the local question, should Keir Starmer have offered any support? The Conflict in the Middle East. Follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app.

23:40Right, we'll obviously keep across everything that's going on with Iran. But there's been a story that we've been following, and I'm sure many of you will have heard about over the last week, 10 days or so. So I think it's really interesting because I think it's starting to get to a point which tells us something about the differences increasingly between particularly kind of like left wing thought, progressive thought in America and the UK. And this is a story of John Davidson. Some of you may have seen the film, I swear, which is about John Davidson. John Davidson is a caretaker from Scotland.

24:13He's had Tourette's since he was a teenager and he's become a well-known campaigner on the subject. He has a form of Tourette's, which means you have very strong verbal and physical tics. You know, he swears, he says things that people find offensive. That is the nature of his condition. It's completely involuntary. He cannot help it, as anybody who knows anybody with Tourette's knows. And of course, this film, I swear, is a film based on his life. I actually watched it last night. It's an amazing film. Incredibly moving, also incredibly funny. What has been less funny is some of the reaction to what happened at the BAFTA Film Awards about what 10 days or so ago two weeks ago where he was there because he was there obviously because the film i swear was up and actually the guy who played him the actor who played him in that actually got the best actor bafta he was there he had tourette's and he was shouting things that were offensive including at one point the n-word in front of two black actors who were presenting an award this incident obviously caused a lot of shock in the room at the time a lot of reaction online because it was broadcast because the bbc even though there was a two hour delay to this whole thing the bbc put it out it was broadcast with the use of the n-word and this has created a great deal of controversy in particular not just about the bbc or bafta or the way this happened but in america in particular there has been something that has been i think really quite shocking at least for me which is criticism of davidson himself from a lot of quite well-known American progressives, basically suggesting that this was something that was in his heart and that he should never have been allowed into the room in the first place as a result of the discomfort that he caused to people who heard the word.

25:58And this is really kind of come into sharp focus, particularly in the last 24, 48 hours, with a series of things that have happened, including this. This is a Saturday night live sketch, which actually wasn't broadcast for time, but it was put online, which was parodying American celebrities who had done particularly bad things because they're suggesting in the sketch that they had Tourette's. Hi, I'm Mel Gibson. And as I probably should have pointed out decades ago, I too suffer from Tourette's, which explains a lot of the things I've said or yelled through the years. Am I proud of what I said?

26:31No. But I am very proud for you to know it was because of Tourette's. Fortunately, I'm not Hi, cuties. I'm Armie Hammer. And not many people know this, but one of the most common side effects of Tourette's is cannibalism. You could be casually DMing with a girl, and suddenly the Tourette's takes over, and you're typing stuff like, I'm literally going to eat you. And she's like, LOL, what? And you're like, I'm not LOLing. Or ROFLing. I'm gonna drink your blood and nod the meat off your ribs like I'm at an Applebee's. But since it's Tourette's, I guess I have to be forgiven if not celebrated. Thanks, medicine.

27:16Immediately after the BAFTAs, I talked to the doctors and the scientists and the lawyers. And they agreed that apparently could suffer from something called the drink Tourette's. So you say I try to order the Diet Coke. It's simple, right? Only sometimes it'll come out like I need a double whiskey with a bunch of GHB mixed in. And then I have a second condition called gender blindness. So instead of giving the drink to myself, I give it to like 60 different women. Anywho, that's how the Tourette's works with the hizzing and the fizzing and the zippa-zappity. Oh. And so it went on. I mean, I didn't know what I found worse.

27:59The fact that it was so unbelievably crass or just so horrendously unfunny, unfunny despite the best efforts of presumably the script writers to make this an absolute kind of you know rib tickling experience for the audience i mean it was awful and it's also punching down so much where you're taking the piss out of someone who's got to rest i mean yeah he used the n-word at the baftas and of course you know anyone is going to be offended by that he also got an mbe for his charity work in 2019 and got his mbe from the queen and told her to fuck off uh which again i think yeah fuck the queen so you know so that's the thing there's form i mean this is does he mean fuck the queen no he was just it's a he's got tourettes and so this is what he said and yet it's become as a sort of oh my god this man is a disgusting racist and he has been pilloried and vilified for it.

29:02Well, something else happened at the weekend, which was the NAACP Image Awards. So the NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. It's an American civil rights organisation, a very storied one. And that was in LA on Saturday. And Delroy Lindo, who was one of the actors who was presenting at the BAFTA and had to hear that N-word, which I'm sure must have been awful. Delroy Lindo was there and he was on the stage. and there was, I think, an introduction to him from a comedian, which I think arguably might have been even worse in some ways than the SNL skit. Just listen to this.