THE spectre of the Iraq war is hanging heavy over Keir Starmer today. The Prime Minister opposed that act of criminal aggression at the time, at least in part because he knew that Tony Blair was acting in flagrant violation of international law in invading a sovereign state to change its regime.

Yet today, Starmer is clearly flirting with committing the same crime in relation to Iran. Israeli officials have made it abundantly clear that their bombing campaign aims at overthrowing the regime in the Islamic Republic. 

Whatever view one holds of that government, and the pages of this paper have always been open to its principled opponents, it is a matter for the Iranian people alone to change it.

Nor can it be argued with a straight face that Iran is menacing Britain with attack. There is no such threat.

One difference between 2003 and today is that Starmer appears to have been supplied with unvarnished legal advice spelling out the lawlessness of any British participation in attacking Iran.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, then attorney-general Lord Goldsmith allowed Downing Street to browbeat him into agreeing that UN authority, which was not forthcoming, was unnecessary before invading.

His present-day successor, Richard Hermer, is understood to have told Starmer that for Britain to do anything beyond protecting allies from attack would breach international law.

That ought to be the end of the matter, but here the continuities with 2003 take over. Above all, we have a Labour Prime Minister desperate to keep in with a belligerent administration in Washington.

If Trump does decide to join in Netanyahu’s barbarous onslaught on Iran, he may well ask for British assistance. Indeed, London would have to sanction the use of the British base in Diego Garcia, home to the bombers the US would likely deploy.

Nothing we know about Starmer suggests he would be inclined to turn down such a request from Trump, whose capacity for resentment at being thus snubbed could easily doom the fragile Anglo-US trade deal.

Moreover, Starmer has already proved that his support for international law is strictly contingent, as he has consistently failed to call out the manifold and egregious violations carried out by Israel in Gaza on a daily basis.

International law is for others, not the US and its warmongering allies, it seems.

Already, Britain is dipping its toe — or even a whole leg — in the waters of war, despite the government’s stated preference for a diplomatic resolution.

In a masterpiece of Orwellian double-speak, Defence Secretary John Healey announced the dispatch of more RAF fighters to the region in order to “reinforce the urgent need for de-escalation.”

So Britain escalates in order to … de-escalate. Clearly, the spirit of the “dodgy dossiers” and manufactured “intelligence” which greased the path to war in 2003 is still abroad.

The anti-war movement is right to demand that Britain stays out of the conflict, which means doing nothing to protect Israel from the consequences of its own aggression.

It also means turning down flat any demand from Trump to embroil British forces in the conflict, or to use British bases for his own military intervention.

Opposition to such wars is perhaps the only remaining pledge from among the ten on which Starmer fraudulently secured the Labour leadership in 2020, which he has not already explicitly broken or reversed, although his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has long since breached the essence of it.

If he brushes aside Hermer’s warnings against attacking Iran, he will stand damned as a Blair-type war criminal, fit only for The Hague tribunal.