In his argument yesterday that right-wingers should oppose the US-Israeli military action against Iran, my colleague Matt Treacy made several worthy arguments, chief amongst them that any good and conscientious conservative should always keep one eye on “blowback”: That is, the prospect that the collapse of stability in the middle east could unleash yet another wave of immigration into Europe from those fleeing the kind of chaos that sent a million Syrians our way in the middle of the last decade.
He also however made an argument that I found rather strange, so I’ll do him the courtesy of quoting it in full:
The Pavlovian instinct on the right to support anything the left is against – an instinct also seen very often on the left – places persons who consider themselves to be nationalists in the strange company of people like Alan Shatter who has publicly backed the offensive.
Perhaps some of Shatter’s current admirers might care to recall that he was the main architect of the lucky bag citizenship regulations, has never made any secret of his support for mass immigration, and was one of the early and strongest advocates in Leinster House of legalising abortion.
Matt is right, of course, to warn against mindless tribalism, and right of course that it works both ways. If persons who favour the war are guilty of being on the same side as noted mainstream liberal Alan Shatter, then persons who oppose it should surely reflect on the fact that they share a position with noted tax evader Mick Wallace, noted far leftist Paul Murphy, and noted islamists such as the Muslim brotherhood. The idea of “strange bedfellows” works in more than one direction, which is why I tend to think ideas should be judged on their own merits, rather than on whatever particular coalition of views they appeal to.
When the war began, I wrote an article on these pages saying that I thought it was ill-conceived: The American President has variously, since it began, vindicated these concerns by being entirely unclear as to what the war is exactly supposed to achieve. One minute, he tells us that the war is almost done; the next minute he tells us he wishes to handpick the next leader of Iran; and on another occasion he mentions that he simply wants to degrade that country’s ability to attack its neighbours and spread terror around the world. What Alan Shatter’s views on these issues are is something I neither know, nor particularly care about. President Trump’s own lack of clarity in terms of what he wishes to achieve should be a much greater concern, given that one man is a former Irish Minister who has held no office in a decade, and the other is the self-declared leader of the free world.
But at the same time Matt is quite keen on the views of other “right wing” European leaders, such as Prime Minister Meloni, President Orban of Hungary, and the leaders of the German opposition party AfD, all of whom have warned about or criticised the war in relatively stark terms. He criticises those such as Nigel Farage who he says have been quite keen to get their own armed forces involved in the conflict.
But, like it or not, there is another view of the war, and one that should be quite mainstream on the right: That view is simply that the Iranian Mullahs, and the ideology that they represent, are the civilisational enemies of every western country. What they believe, and how they govern their societies, and the ideas they export, are all anathema to the western enlightenment, democracy, freedom, and civilisation as we have come to understand it.
You do not need me to convince you of that. You simply need to read what the Iranians have been saying in public for years: That they wish to exterminate the state of Israel, bring down western democracy, and establish a global Islamic regime of what they believe to be liberation, but most of us would rightly believe to be repression. Even for an allegedly Trump-deranged skeptic like me, choosing a side between him and the Iranian theocrats is not a particularly challenging exercise. Note that I am not choosing that position out of affection for the Orange Man, or out of some imagined loyalty to Alan Shatter, whose domestic policies I have always largely opposed (his admirable attempt at legal reform aside), but out of a recognition that handing nuclear weapons to a regime that glorifies death and martyrdom is a generationally awful idea.
The entire basis of the notion that nuclear “deterrence” exists is that nobody rational or sane would ever use nuclear weapons because to do so would lead to their own destruction. That is a rational position in the case of liberal democracies where people tend to wish to avoid death. It is an entirely different proposition in a regime that says that death and martyrdom are the highest religious duty of the leadership class, as the Iranians do.
Whether we like it or not, the civilised world does not begin and end at our own borders. The Iranian regime, entirely aside from its own horrific treatment of internal dissenting voices, has always had a character Matt would recognise as Trotskyist: It desires to export the Islamic Revolution. The idea that there can be friendship or even co-existence between western liberalism (a word I use in its broadest sense) and Islamic theocracy is ludicrous, something that the Mullahs explicitly recognise, even if many western liberals do not.
Matt’s major concern, that there might be a wave of immigration to Europe on foot of the war, is a genuine one. As are concerns I outline above about the war’s ad-hoc nature and questionable planning. But it is equally valid for the Israelis and the Americans to be concerned about a brutal and repressive theocracy that has for forty-seven years openly devoted itself to the destruction of both countries. Disarming your enemy before he can inflict harm on you is an entirely reasonable goal. Besides, Matt and I would presumably agree that any decision by Europe to admit some wave of refugees would be a choice – and an unwise one – rather than an obligation.
In the past week alone, Iran has struck over a dozen countries that are not making war on it, in an attempt to destabilise the entire western and world economy. Could such a state be trusted with nuclear weapons, or even its current capabilities? If the answer to that question is “no” – and there is very good reason to think it is – then some kind of action to deprive the regime of the capability for the long term is entirely defensible.
You may say “yes it could be trusted with Nuclear weapons”, or you may make any argument you wish. But to suggest that believing that any expression of qualified support for the US-Israeli action is merely some kind of reflexive right-wing pro-Alan Shatter tribalism is, I think, an error.