Tony Benn stood in that chamber in February 1998 and asked a question so simple, so devastatingly human, that the entire edifice of Western war-making should have collapsed under its weight. “Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination?”
Parliament shuffled. The whips did their work. The bombs fell. And 28 years later, on February 28, while Iran’s foreign minister was literally in Geneva declaring a “historic” agreement was within reach — Washington and Tel Aviv answered Tony Benn’s question with fire, assassination, and the attempted (calculated) murder of a civilisation. They called it Operation Epic Fury. The name tells you everything about the psychology of the perpetrators. Not strategy. Fury. The tantrum of an empire that cannot negotiate because negotiation requires treating the other side as human.
Tel Aviv today looks like Gaza. Vast stretches now lie in rubble — a mirror held up to every Israeli airstrike, every flattened apartment block, every hospital reduced to dust that the Western client media spent years explaining away. US bases across the Gulf are being systematically destroyed from Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, to Saudi Arabia by Iranian missiles and Shahed drones that Washington insisted had been neutralised after the 12 day war. 8 American soldiers (real number likely higher) are in body bags. The bill is running and the cashier is not accepting American exceptionalism as payment.
On February 25, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi stated publicly that a deal was within reach. Israel had been lobbying Washington hard for months. The decision was not made in the Situation Room weighing threat assessments. It was made in Tel Aviv and whispered into the ear of a president who demanded unconditional surrender from a nation of 90 million people. This was a war of choice — Israel’s war, rented to Washington, paid for in Iranian and American blood, with the invoice still running.
And now the regime-change virus they engineered for Tehran is airborne and it does not respect the borders of client states. Bahrain is witnessing mass street rioting from its Shia majority, the same majority that has lived under the boot of a Sunni monarchy propped up by the very Fifth Fleet now taking Iranian fire. That contagion does not stop at Bahrain’s causeway. It moves. And Israel itself which has never looked weaker, never looked more like a broken garrison dependent on American air cover may yet find that the determination it tried to bomb out of existence has instead multiplied, crossed borders, and is knocking on doors far closer to home than Tehran.
They assassinated a supreme leader and believed the state would dissolve. They struck hospitals, schools, the Grand Bazaar, UNESCO World Heritage sites and believed the people would beg. Instead, Iran consolidated, a new supreme leader was named within ten days, and the missiles kept flying. Tony Benn knew this in 1998. Every honest student of history knows this. Bombing does not break the will of a people who have survived revolution, Saddam’s chemical weapons, and decades of sanctions. It forges that will into something that does not negotiate from ruins — it endures them, and eventually, it prevails.
The last word belongs to Benn, because he earned it. “What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 news item.” Over a thousand Iranians are dead including 170 innocent girls. The Golestan Palace, a monument to Persian civilisation that survived the Mongols is rubble. And somewhere in Tehran tonight, an Iranian mother is weeping over her child, just as Benn said she would. Washington heard that question in 1998 and chose bombs. It heard it again in 2003. It is hearing it now and the answer, as Benn warned, is not surrender. It is determination. Hardened, multiplied, and spreading.
