Watching this war in the Middle East, there’s a curious dilemma at work.
For years I worked as a correspondent in the region. I know from personal experience that this kind of weaponry, being used on this scale, translates into blood, killing and massive destruction of not only military targets but millions of lives.
I look at the warring parties – Washington and Tehran – and, having worked both at the White House and in the Middle East, from Israel to Iran, I can acknowledge that in this conflict, neither side deserves to win.
New FeatureIn ShortQuick Stories. Same trusted journalism.
In my work, I covered the murderous, bloodthirsty nature of the so-called theocratic regime in Iran, the brutal use of conscripts as cannon-fodder in the merciless war with Iraq in the 1980s, then the massacre at the start of this century of tens of thousands of protesters who dared to challenge the Ayatollah’s rule.
When I lived in Lebanon, and then Israel, I watched the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran use Beirut, Gaza, Hebron and Nablus as a playground for their shadow war against the Jewish state and America, arming and financing the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas. The many lives lost were simply not a concern for the military force that rules Iran alongside the so-called religious leaders.
David Smith in Beirut during civil war in Lebanon (Photo: David Smith)
Recently, we have had a glimpse of the deep corruption of the ruling elite in Tehran, with the exposure of their sprawling assets across the West. No surprise here: for years, one of the Iranian contacts from my years in the region as a correspondent had insisted the former Supreme Leader’s portfolio was worth tens of billions of dollars, from properties in Dubai and Paris to massive holdings in the oil and gas industries.
His son, Mojtaba, the new boss, has by all accounts luxury mansions on London’s “Billionaires Row”, off the Bishops Avenue in Hampstead. So much for Death to America, eh? Such financial exploitation of power is straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. The Trump family has already made billions in his first year back in power, as have those who financed his campaigns. Oil and gas titans are already said to be benefiting from his intervention in Venezuela, while waiting to do likewise in Iran, we are told.
And there, perhaps, is the rub. Because when you look at the other side in this war, you have to gasp at the shameless quality of what the White House is doing. You need to ask yourself the price that victory for Trump will bring, and how he might use it to keep changing the rules of our beleaguered world order.
David Smith meeting Donald Trump at a US Senate hearing in 2005 while he was working for the UN. Trump, a real estate tycoon, was speaking to the committee about planned renovations of the UN headquarters (Photo: David Smith)
The manner of going to war spoke volumes. There was no attempt to consult the Congress, nor even consideration of advising age-old allies in Europe, no consultation with the likes of the UN, but an alliance with an Israeli government that has long wanted the destruction of the Islamic Republic. So much for the West calling out Vladimir Putin over invading Ukraine, when we go to war with no respect for the rules that were designed to keep the peace after 1945.
All this from a leader who promised, consistently, not to go to war. “I’m not going to start wars,” he said on election night in 2024. “I’m going to stop wars.” He went further when being sworn in for his second term in January 2025. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end – and perhaps, most importantly, the wars we never get into.” Sorry, Mr President, come again?
Then consider the language used, not just by Trump, but by his acolytes. As a long-time White House correspondent, I can guess that even George W Bush and his henchman Don Rumsfeld (remember Rumsfeld suggesting “s**t happens” when the Iraq invasion turned ugly and murderous?) would blanch at listening to the so-called Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. “They’re toast and they know it,” he said of the Iranian leadership. “We’ve only just begun to hunt ‘em.”
The official White House X account has followed up with posts of what resemble video games, yes video games, depicting “mass guided bombs”, US fighter jets taking off from aircraft carriers and missiles launched, striking targets in the desert. Real footage of war is reduced to a game. Quite what an Abraham Lincoln or a Gerald Ford (the aircraft carriers in the region are named after those presidents) would make of such infantile, bloodthirsty war talk we can only guess.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, has been revealed to have amassed an array of sprawling international investments (Photo: Iran state TV via AP)
Some of us, then, are left with a dilemma. We’d like to think that in stopping the slaughter of those who dare to challenge the Ayatollahs on the streets of Tehran, putting an end to the merciless use of mercenary armies in Lebanon, let alone preventing a religiously zealous regime having nuclear weapons, we are seeing the best of humanity confronting the worst.
But in Trump and his cohort, that’s not what we have. We have a war machine dedicated to giving the Supreme Leader in Washington a victory, come what may. In the process, the West loses the priceless advantage of showing the wider world which side has principles. Which side knows right from wrong. No sense of shame indeed.
David Smith was an award-winning correspondent for ITN/ C4News in Africa, the Middle East, Moscow and Washington before becoming an adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, representing the UN at the White House and the US Congress. The author of three books, one a study of the Middle East conflict, Prisoners of God, he has been a visiting professor at US Universities, and in later years, was a correspondent for The Economist in Latin America