Starmer's Iran errors have humiliated UK & isolated us from key allies… it's shameful US & Israel had to go it alone
GOODBYE 'TACO', hello to 14 30,000lb Massive Ordnance Penetrators raining down from B-2 stealth bombers with deadly precision.
The US President's critics' favourite line — that Trump Always Chickens Out — lasted about as long as an Iranian intelligence chief popping down the shops.
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In just eight days, Israel and the US have dismantled the Mad Mullahs' military hierarchy and reduced their terrifying nuclear ambition to dust.
Mossad has clearly filleted the inner workings of the Iranian state, able to assassinate its evil henchmen and their instant replacements at will.
History will regard the sickening October 7 attack by Iran -backed Hamas as one of the biggest strategic cock-ups by a warmongering nation in history.
Pretty pathetic
Since that day in 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were killed with Iranian-funded weapons, fired by Iranian-trained militants, a snowballing retaliation has ripped through Iran's entire standing in the Middle East.
First through the terrorist tunnels of Gaza, then the extraordinary exploding pagers literally decapitating Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.
As Iran's proxy network unraveled at the sharp end of Israel's canny might, it has looked increasingly isolated from old chums China and Russia, who have not rushed to its aid.
Now there are questions over the future of the regime in Tehran, as Israel's missiles and drones force them to cower in bunkers rather than stop the 92million citizens of the rogue state casting off the shackles of 46 years of Islamic tyranny.
It was one helluva audacious strike by a tiny democracy on the menacing nearby dictatorship, ten times its size, that has spent decades vowing to wipe Israel off the map.
It sparked a week of international hand-wringing, mind games, false flags, misdirection, social media diplomacy and shattered reputations.
And then Saturday night's piece de resistance from the air, which saw President Trump come good on his long-standing pledge that Iran must never have a nuke.
Warnings that Tehran was hell-bent on building a bomb have kept countless Presidents awake at night, but despite a wall of diplomatic bedwetting, finally one has taken action.
And the mullahs only have themselves to blame.
Trump gave Tehran 60 days to come to the table, but instead they continued to enrich uranium, stall for talks and attempt to continue their pernicious proxy war against Israel and the wider West.
Given the implications for us all, it is shameful the US and Israel had to not only go it alone at this historic moment, but act in the face of public warnings to de-escalate from fellow world leaders such as Sir Keir Starmer.
His watery Foreign Office drivel about the need to step back and return to a table — aka repeat the mistakes of the last 20 years — have left the UK isolated from, and distrusted by, two of its most important allies.
Whether driven by naivety, misinformation or a slavish love of his Attorney General Lord Hermer, who decreed we may break the rules by helping out friends, Starmer's insistence 'that we need to de-escalate this' looks pretty pathetic as the world woke up safer yesterday morning to a nuclear-free Iran.
And it was a misstep to declare publicly, on camera, having sat next to President Trump at dinner at the G7 in Canada last week, that there was 'nothing the President said that suggests he's about to get involved in this conflict'.
Pushed that all signs were pointing to a US strike, the PM even doubled down, telling reporters: 'On the contrary, throughout the dinner, I was sitting right next to President Trump, so I've no doubt, in my mind, the level of agreement there was.'
So either Trump misled him, or Starmer missed the art of the deal with the President playing mind games with the mullahs.
Either way, it was a humiliation for Britain to be so out of the loop.
Rough few days
The UK has publicly hectored the US not to get involved, and appears to have made American bombers take the 40-hour long way round to Iran, rather than offer our support and services at our base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean that could have shortened that trip dramatically.
The Government insists no request for support was made, but it should have been offered before even needing to be asked.
How naive Labour's arms embargoes on Israel and petty sanctions on its politicians also look now, however well it went down with their MPs scared of losing their seats to Gaza independents.
For a PM who clearly enjoys the lure of the international stage far more than his unpopularity back home, it's been a rough few days.
And as he gets back in his jet for the Nato summit tonight, he better be planning how to mend those bridges with the United States and Israel — and quick.
It's one thing to lose friends at home, but unforgivable to lose them in such a weak manner abroad.
A public 'well done and thank you' to our allies would not go amiss either.
SWITCH over to the BBC and you would think they were covering a state funeral yesterday, with the sombre reporting of the destruction of three Iranian nuclear facilities.
The attack came just days after limp-as-a-lettuce TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall took to the Beeb to demand Israel and the US leave poor Iran alone.
Over on Sky News, you would have thought there was a moral equivalence to the democratically elected leader of the free world and the evil Ayatollah Khamenei.
But the prize for clown coverage has to go to LBC's Lewis Goodall, who argued the Iranian dictatorship had the right to build the Bomb because Israel (a democracy) has one and those nice men in Tehran were actually the ones obeying all the international nuclear rules.
Is there some pundit madrasah where they are brainwashing these jokers?
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Oil hits five-month high after US hits key Iranian nuclear sites
SINGAPORE, June 23 (Reuters) - Oil prices jumped on Monday to their highest since January as Washington's weekend move to join Israel in attacking Iran's nuclear facilities stoked supply worries. Brent crude futures rose $1.88 or 2.44% at $78.89 a barrel as of 1122 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude advanced $1.87 or 2.53% at $75.71. Both contracts jumped by more than 3% earlier in the session to $81.40 and $78.40, respectively, five-month highs, before giving up some gains. The rise in prices came after U.S. President Donald Trump said he had "obliterated" Iran's main nuclear sites in strikes over the weekend, joining an Israeli assault in an escalation of conflict in the Middle East as Tehran vowed to defend itself. Iran is OPEC's third-largest crude producer. Market participants expect further price gains amid mounting fears that an Iranian retaliation may include a closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global crude supply flows. Iran's Press TV reported that the Iranian parliament approved a measure to close the strait. Iran has in the past threatened to close the strait but has never followed through on the move. "The risks of damage to oil infrastructure ... have multiplied," said Sparta Commodities senior analyst June Goh. Although there are alternative pipeline routes out of the region, there will still be crude volumes that cannot be fully exported out if the Strait of Hormuz becomes inaccessible. Shippers will increasingly stay out of the region, she added. Brent has risen 13% since the conflict began on June 13, while WTI has gained around 10%. The current geopolitical risk premium is unlikely to last without tangible supply disruptions, analysts said. Meanwhile, the unwinding of some of the long positions accumulated following a recent price rally could cap an upside to oil prices, Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, wrote in a market commentary on Sunday.
Times
39 minutes ago
- Times
Can Iran still build nuclear weapons after the US bombing?
The 14 GBU-57 'bunker-busters' dropped by the Pentagon's B2 stealth bombers on Iran's nuclear facilities will have done a lot of damage, with about 200 tons of heavy munitions. They may not have 'fully obliterated' all three sites at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow as President Trump claimed, but they probably did cause 'severe damage' in the more modest assessment of the Pentagon. That does not mean, however, that Iran's nuclear programme is dead and buried. Apart from anything else, somewhere in Iran is probably a deadly cargo of canisters in secure storage. They contain just over 400kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity — enough, with some extra enrichment, for about nine nuclear warheads. That level of enrichment means the uranium is 60 per cent made up of the U235 isotope needed to make the kind of bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In the raw, uranium consists of 1 per cent U235 and 99 per cent U238 isotope. Weapons-grade uranium is 90 per cent U235. To get from one to the other, a machine — of the sort the Iranians have at Isfahan — converts the uranium to uranium hexafluoride gas. That gas is then taken to one of the two known Iranian enrichment facilities, at Natanz or Fordow. There it is passed through racks of centrifuges which spin at hundreds of times a second, threshing the heavier U238 to the outside and leaving behind the 'enriched' gas with its greater concentration of U235. • Who are Iran's allies — and will any help after the US strikes? The Israelis and Americans will be hoping that the bunker-busters — 12 dropped on Fordow, whose centrifuge chambers are buried 90 metres below ground, and two on the shallower Natanz — will have destroyed those centrifuges. They are sensitive and even the lesser strikes on Natanz by the Israelis at the start of their own bombing campaign may have put them out of use. Questions remain, however. Did the US mission succeed? Satellite imagery of the Fordow site in the aftermath of the bombing seems to show some holes in the mountain above it, which may be consistent with damage. One possibility is that the bombs did not manage to break into the chamber but collapsed it enough to have the required effect. At Isfahan, the unit converting uranium to uranium hexafluoride, and the separate plant that converts the enriched gas back to metal to be turned into a warhead, are both believed to have been easier targets. • 'The key thing is that the enrichment facilities and metal conversion facilities are now non-operational and potentially destroyed,' said Ian Stewart, a former Ministry of Defence specialist and now director of the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute in the United States. 'It will take weeks or months to reconstitute those capabilities.' Are there hidden centrifuges? Secondly, there is the question of whether the Iranians have more centrifuges hidden away elsewhere, allowing them to restart the programme fairly quickly. 'We have to assume the Iranians are competent and put aside a spare set of equipment,' Stewart said. 'They may also have set up small numbers of machines in unknown locations. So for planning purposes you have to assume it will take weeks or months for Iran to reconstitute the enrichment capability, not years.' Iran has, of course, lost key members of its nuclear 'command and control'. Back in November 2020, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, assassinated Brigadier-General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Revolutionary Guards officer seen as the mastermind of the 'dual use' programme: one built overtly for civilian purposes, but compatible with a decision to build a bomb. He was ambushed and shot near his weekend villa outside Tehran by a robot-controlled machinegun on a pick-up truck. Since the Israeli bombing began on June 13, at least ten prominent nuclear scientists, including Fereydoon Abbasi, a former head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI), and many of the leaders of the Guards have also been killed. However, the programme employs thousands of people, many of whom are experts in their fields. 'The Iranian nuclear programme is decades old and draws on extensive Iranian indigenous expertise,' Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said. 'The physical elimination of the programme's infrastructure — and even the assassination of Iranian scientists — will not be sufficient to destroy the latent knowledge that exists in the country.' Key to the future is the whereabouts of that 400kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium, which Stewart called 'the most valuable asset in Iran right now'. Iran could fashion it into a large but crude nuclear device that could be transported by lorry, or, with a few centrifuges it had saved, convert some of it into a smaller nuclear weapon. Will Iran risk all-out war? Iran may or may not choose to escalate militarily, to try to show that it still has the military teeth and, indeed, necessary level of defiance to risk an all-out confrontation with the United States. But in the medium term it has a huge question to answer that is both technical and political. Does it tell the International Atomic Energy Agency where those cylinders of enriched uranium are, as it is required to do under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) to which — unlike Israel — it is a signatory? If it does, it will no doubt fear that the information will make its way to Israel or the US. If it does not, and particularly if it withdraws from the NPT, that could prompt the European states — Britain, France and Germany — who are still signatories to the semi-defunct 2015 nuclear deal to trigger a 'snapback' mechanism. That would entail reintroducing more sanctions and renewing the UN ban on the nuclear programme. The 2015 deal expires in October. President Trump still says he wants a new one — on his terms. An Iran that wanted peace at all costs would probably comply. But the Iran that exists at present — the Islamic Republic — has so far refused to fold. It may, eventually, agree to more talks. But the United States and Israel will be wary that this is a play for time, until the nuclear deal expires, or just until Trump tires of the whole issue.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Russia warns Trump he has opened 'Pandora's box' with strike on Iran as regime holds talks in Moscow and fears grow that the UK will now face terror backlash
Russia last night warned Donald Trump had opened 'Pandora's box' after the US President launched a 'bunker buster' raid on Iran. Trump said the audacious attack by a squadron of stealth bombers in the early hours of yesterday had 'taken the bomb right out of [Tehran's] hands'. But Moscow 's United Nations ambassador Vassily Nebenzia issued an ominous warning at an emergency meeting of the Security Council as he said: 'No one knows what new catastrophes and suffering it will bring.' And he claimed Russia had offered mediation talks to find a peaceful and mutually agreeable solution to Iran's nuclear program, but the US, especially its leaders, are 'clearly not interested in diplomacy today'. 'Unless we stop the escalation,' Nebenzia warned, 'the Middle East will find itself on the verge of a large scale conflict with unpredictable consequences for the entire international security system, plus the entire world might end up on the verge of a nuclear disaster.' Trump has sensationally called for a regime change in Iran as he held crisis talks with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday. The US president took to his Truth Social page to share updates about the country's military attacks on Iran, when he suggested that the current regime 'is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.' 'Why wouldn't there be a regime change,' Trump asked, rhetorically - even as he and Starmer urged Ayatollah Khameini to 'return to the negotiating table as soon as possible.' Russian ex-president Dmitriy Medvedev claimed in a post on X/Twitter early on Sunday that the US strikes on three sites in Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow had backfired and led to the opposite result from what Trump had set out to achieve. In a taunting post, Medvedev claimed: 'Enrichment of nuclear material — and, now we can say it outright, the future production of nuclear weapons — will continue.' Medvedev, who has served as President of Russia from 2008 to 2012, further stated that 'Iran's political regime has survived — and in all likelihood, has come out even stronger'. He continued to claim that Iranians are 'rallying around the country's spiritual leadership, including those who were previously indifferent or opposed to it'. His anti-US and pro-Iran social media rant was posted in English and broken down into ten points - gathering more than three million views. Medvedev, who has served as Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia since 2020, has been regarded by some as a potential potential successor to Putin. There are fears Britain and other allies could face a terror backlash from the regime's supporters. Seven B-2 stealth bombers swept into Iranian airspace undetected yesterday, dropping 14 'bunker-buster' bombs on nuclear facilities as the US joined Israel in the biggest Western military action against the Islamic Republic since its 1979 revolution. The UK was informed of the mission, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer, but played no part. Cabinet minister Jonathan Reynolds last night warned that Iranian activity in the UK was already substantial, and it was 'naive' to think it won't escalate. Britain's military bases in the region, such as RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus, were on the highest state of alert last night for revenge attacks, including by Iranian swarm drones. Defence Secretary John Healey said: 'The safety of UK personnel and bases is my top priority. Force protection is at its highest level and we deployed additional jets [to Cyprus] this week.' Other experts warned of a 'new era of terrorism' and US Vice President J D Vance said the FBI and law enforcement were on alert for threats on American soil. Sir Keir Starmer and President Trump discussed the need for Iran to return to the negotiating table in a phone call last night, No 10 said. A spokesman said: 'The leaders discussed the situation in the Middle East and reiterated the grave risk posed by Iran's nuclear programme to international security. 'They discussed the actions taken by the United States last night to reduce the threat and agreed that Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. 'They discussed the need for Iran to return to the negotiating table as soon as possible. They agreed to stay in close contact in the coming days.' The Prime Minister urged all sides to return to negotiations but said he had taken 'all necessary measures' to protect British interests in the region if the conflict escalates. Before and after pictures of Fordow underground complex, taken on June 20 (left) and June 22 (right) In an address to the nation as the B-2s were flying home, Mr Trump said: 'Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror. 'Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. 'If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.' President Trump boasted the US had 'taken the bomb right out of their hands (and they would use it if they could!)', while his Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed the US had offered Iran a civil nuclear programme but 'they rejected it'. He added: 'They played us. They wouldn't respond to our offers. They disappeared for ten days. The President had to take action as a response. 'We are not declaring war on Iran. We're not looking for war in Iran. But if they attack us, I think we have the capabilities they haven't even seen yet.' Last night, despite widespread calls to de- escalate, Iran president Masoud Pezeshkian said the US 'must receive a response for their aggression'. And a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, warned: 'There will no longer be any place for the presence of the United States and its bases' in the region. Abbas Araghaci, Iran's foreign minister who described the US government as 'lawless and warmongering', is expected to meet Putin in Moscow today to discuss how to respond. Speaking hours after the US strikes, Business Secretary Mr Reynolds told Sky News the risk from Iran in the UK was 'not hypothetical'. He said: 'There is not a week goes by without some sort of Iranian cyber-attack on a key part of the UK's critical national infrastructure. 'There is Iranian activity on the streets of the UK, which is wholly unacceptable. 'It's already at a significant level. I think it would be naive to say that that wouldn't potentially increase.' A statement of the E3 group, with the UK alongside France and Germany, said: 'We call upon Iran to engage in negotiations leading to an agreement that addresses all concerns associated with its nuclear programme. 'We stand ready to contribute to that goal in coordination with all parties. 'We urge Iran not to take any further action that could destabilise the region.' But Iran threatened to hold the world hostage by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway in the region and a chokepoint for world trade and oil transit. Last night, the head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog said Iran's Natanz enrichment site was 'completely destroyed'. The extent of the damage at the Fordow site, built into a mountainside and reinforced with layers of concrete, is unclear. Discussing Fordow, Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: 'There are clear indications of impacts. But, as for the assessment for the degree of damage underground... no one could tell you how much it has been damaged. One cannot exclude that there is significant damage there.'
