Keir Starmer’s cowardice amid Iran war shames Britain — and insults the US

LONDON — Never in the field of human conflict has a British prime minister done so much to look as small as Keir Starmer does now.

This Labour government is an embarrassment to the British people and an insult to our American cousins.

“The United Kingdom played no role in these strikes,” Starmer said hours after America and Israel took out Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gang of terrorist thugs.

The PM then admitted Iran has “backed more than 20 potentially lethal attacks on UK soil” in the last year alone.

What kind of leader does nothing when a rogue state that massacres and tortures its own people tries to do the same to his people? A coward and a fool.

British politicians pride themselves on having a Special Relationship with America, but a friend like this is little more than an enemy without the guts to say it.

A human-rights lawyer by training and a preachy prig by vocation, Starmer specializes in the kind of political language that George Orwell said was “designed to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Starmer is a Hindenburg of hot air. His high-minded cant about international law is cover for the lowest forms of political calculation.

Starmer implies that American action against Iran is illegal under international law.

He means stopping a nuclear Iran is a problem for a prime minister whose popularity has flatlined, whose ministers are lining up to knife him in the front and whose party is terrified of losing the Israel-hating leftists and Muslims who are vital to its electoral base.

That’s why Starmer’s government blocked American planes from launching offensive missions from Britain’s bases. 

Not just from English bases, but also from forward bases such as Cyprus in the Mediterranean and Diego Garcia, the critical Indian Ocean base in the Chagos Islands.

Britain is making missions longer and more dangerous for America’s airmen and women.

On Thursday, it came out that Starmer suggested letting the United States use the bases, but his own ministers had overruled him.

He’s as weak as a twice-used teabag.

Meanwhile, Britain’s planes are on the ground and Britain’s global standing is corroded.

The Royal Air Force is flatfooted on its bases when it should be in the air aiding its American allies.

The Royal Navy, the heavyweight champion of maritime history, is docked when its gunboats should be policing the Mediterranean.

Its new aircraft carriers should be “east of Suez” with the US Fifth Fleet. Instead, they’re docked for repair.

The British Army that drew a red line on more battlefields than the Roman Empire is confined to barracks because its new Ajax personnel carriers are so badly made that a short ride causes vomiting, joint damage and deafness.

Britain’s legendary military has undergone more cuts than an origami workshop.

Starmer’s crew has no idea what to do as it dawns that international law isn’t real and there are real bad guys out there in the real world — and closer to home on the streets of Britain.

In 1940, Britain rescued its soldiers from Dunkirk. Now, it struggles to evacuate its influencers from Dubai.

This week, Lebanon’s government banned the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from Lebanese soil. But the IRGC still operates in Britain.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Winston Churchill told Neville Chamberlain after Chamberlain caved to Hitler at Munich in 1938. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

But then, as President Donald Trump said, “This is not Winston Churchill we’re dealing with.”

Starmer isn’t even Neville Chamberlain. At least Chamberlain beefed up the British military after Munich for a war he knew would come. Starmer and his ilk have weakened Britain after a war is already afoot.

Margaret Thatcher is turning in her grave. When Argentina attacked the Falkland Islands in 1982, Thatcher overruled the wets in her government and, it must be said, the feebler members of the Reagan administration.

Britain took only three days to launch its biggest armada since the Suez Crisis of 1956. 

When the captain of a British sub spotted an Argentinian cruiser in international waters, Thatcher ordered him to sink it, international law be damned.

In 1986, when President Ronlad Reagan punished Colonel Moammar Khadafy’s Libya after its terrorists blew up American servicemen in Berlin, Thatcher gladly let American bombers launch from British airbases.

In the Cold War, Britain was America’s most powerful and reliable ally. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain backed America.

Today’s Britain is a stumbling block to America.

Today, Israel has replaced Britain as America’s closest and most capable client state. But Britain’s leaders, in their unfathomable arrogance, still expect a free ride.

Not since the days of George III has a British government got Americans so wrong. It won’t go better for Britain this time, either.

The Trump administration is furious, its contempt tinged with pity. Britain’s Arab allies in the Middle East are baffled and insulted.

Britain’s inaction was a choice. Instead of honoring alliances, Starmer chose to placate the ministers who want his job and pander to Labour’s Israel-hating electoral base of bougie leftists and angry Muslims.

He has sold Britain’s dignity for a mess of political pottage: to grub a few more weeks of prime-ministerial perks and pomp. 

Starmer’s Britain is a self-harming soft touch, disarmed and demoralized by a political class that dismisses English history and despises the English people.

It shapes policy not in the national interest, but to pander to a radicalized Muslim minority.

President Trump, please note: Iran isn’t the only failed state with an Islamist problem. Most British people are appalled by Starmer’s government and humiliated by Britain’s willed weakness.

It’s not just America’s enemies who need regime change.

Dominic Green is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of America and the West.