Iran’s Supreme Leader and Donald Trump

Iran Protests: After Deadly Repression, Regime Arrests Leading Activists

I remember the build-up to the 2003 Iraq War. I was just 10 years old, still learning how to navigate the world, when a group of boys at school chased me down chanting, “Kill Iraqis.” They eventually cornered me, raining down kicks and punches. I brushed it off as playground bullying. After all, I was British as well as Iraqi.

But the intimidation and violence were more than that. They were a preview of how entire communities could be dehumanized under the guise of national security. This was a glimpse of where the so-called War on Terror would lead.

I watched bombs rain down on Baghdad, my parents silently weeping as they tried to reach our family back home. I heard about an American patrol spraying my grandfather’s house with bullets from a .50 calibre machine gun mounted on a Humvee. I learned of relatives kidnapped for ransom by sectarian militias.

As an adult, I returned to Mosul. ISIS had seized the city in 2014, holding it for three years before a brutal and devastating liberation. I listened as my family recounted the agony they endured. Children played with stones amid the ruins, their innocence crushed beneath decades of foreign wars and sectarian violence.

I was in the audience when Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the UK Labour Party, issued an apology for the Iraq War following the Chilcot Inquiry in July 2016.

Today, as the West flirts with escalation against Iran under a UK Labour government, I find myself asking the same question again: have we learned nothing from Iraq?

Manufacturing Consent, Again

The language now being used mirrors the build-up to Iraq in 2003: exaggerated threats, selective intelligence, and political theatre dressed up as necessity. Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has spoken openly about sending a “massive armada” of American warships towards Iran, warning that time is running out for Tehran to comply with US demands.

Alongside this, findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is in breach of certain nuclear obligations have been seized upon by Israeli officials. Over the past 18 months Benjamin Netanyahu has revived warnings he has been issuing since the early 1990s about an imminent Iranian nuclear bomb, warnings that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

The tactics feel familiar. Israel’s campaign has included crude CGI animations, recalling Colin Powell’s infamous slideshow at the UN Security Council in 2003, which claimed to show Saddam Hussein’s mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Claims that Iran poses a direct threat to Europe echo the UK Government’s “dodgy dossier”, which asserted that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

Where press conferences and newspaper editorials once played this role, aggressive social media messaging, and bot accounts now does the same work, faster and with even less scrutiny.

Just as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction never materialized, we risk sleepwalking into another manufactured conflict built on assertion rather than evidence. Sabotaging nuclear negotiations and openly calling for regime change are not diplomatic strategies. They are steps towards war.

Iran’s Civilians Are Not the Enemy

Let me be clear. I hold no illusions about the Iranian regime. It is authoritarian, violent, and has long acted as a destabilising force across the region.

I have seen the aftermath of the regime’s actions among family and friends. Iran armed and funded sectarian militias in Iraq that abducted, tortured, and killed. It propped up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, enabling the murder of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of more than 11 million people. At home, it crushes dissent with the same brutality it exports abroad./p>

In recent weeks, ordinary Iranians have again taken to the streets to protest corruption, repression, and economic collapse. They have been met with live fire, mass arrests, internet blackouts, and killings. Protesters have been shot, detained, and disappeared for demanding dignity and accountability. Thousands have been killed.

These civilians are not agents of the regime. They are among its primary victims.

But recognizing the crimes of the Iranian state does not justify war. It does not excuse bombing cities, destabilising an entire region, or gambling with human lives. The suffering of protesters cannot be repurposed as a moral cover for military escalation. The sins of those in power cannot be used to legitimize the slaughter of the people who already suffer under their rule.

Britain’s Complicity and the Politics of Silence

The UK followed the US into Iraq, helped sell the war to the public, and contributed troops and airpower. Today, the pattern repeats itself.

In recent statements, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has signalled British support for a US strike on Iran, saying he backs Donald Trump’s goal of preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Starmer has justified this stance by pointing to Iran’s repression of protesters and the brutality of the regime. Those abuses are real and reprehnsible. But they are being used in a familiar way. In 2003, Saddam Hussein’s crimes were invoked to shore up support for war when the case for weapons of mass destruction began to collapse. Human rights became a moral cover for a regime change and war.

This is not de-escalation. It is preparation for escalation.

By aligning itself with American objectives and echoing their framing, the UK helps legitimise the path to war. And once again, the cost will be borne not by those making the decisions, but by civilians across the region.

Lessons Unlearned

The destruction and the rise of Islamophobia across the West are not accidental. They are the direct consequence of a global system that devalues Arab and Muslim lives.

The War on Terror, launched in Iraq and Afghanistan, shaped the world we now inhabit. It normalized surveillance and the criminalization of Muslim communities. It shattered states, dismantled institutions, and created the conditions from which groups like the ISIS emerged. It gave cover to autocrats and war criminals to crush dissent under the banner of counter-terrorism.

Manufacturing consent is not only about media narratives. It is about dehumanizing people so thoroughly that their deaths are reduced to statistics, and about persuading a new generation to forget that this has all been tried before and failed catastrophically.

This is not about supporting the Iranian Government. It is about opposing war, injustice, and the perpetual sacrifice of Middle Eastern lives in service of Western power.

We must learn from the Iraq War, not repeat it. The people of the region deserve peace, sovereignty, and dignity. Not another proxy war. Not another generation of shattered childhoods.

History is watching. This time, we cannot say we did not know.