Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s veteran Middle East editor, posed the question that has been hanging over Whitehall like a stale cigar: “What was the war for?” His reference, of course, is to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a conflict that now looks even more like a grotesque exercise in futility given the emerging US-Iran nuclear deal.
Sources close to the Foreign Office tell me the deal, which would see Tehran freeze its enrichment programme in exchange for sanctions relief, has sent shockwaves through British intelligence. For nearly two decades, UK policy has been built on the premise of containing Iran. Now, Washington is essentially handing Tehran a diplomatic victory, and London is left scrambling.
“The deal undermines the entire rationale for the Iraq War,” a retired MI6 officer told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We were told Saddam’s WMDs were an existential threat. Now we’re legitimising a regime that actually has a nuclear programme. It’s a betrayal of every soldier who served in Basra.”
But the implications go deeper. Uncovered documents from a 2019 parliamentary committee show that British defence planners have long assumed US support for a hardline stance on Iran. That assumption is now in tatters. The deal, expected to be signed within weeks, would require the UK to lift its own sanctions and restore diplomatic ties with Tehran. For a country that still lists Iran as a state sponsor of terror, that’s a political earthquake.
The Treasury is sweating. British banks, already nervous after the 2015 deal collapsed, now face a fresh wave of compliance headaches. “It’s a laundering nightmare,” a City compliance officer told me. “We’ll have to unwind years of sanctions infrastructure while keeping an eye on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The Americans are leaving us to clean up the mess.”
Bowen’s question is the right one. What was the war for? The answer, it seems, was nothing. A trillion dollars, thousands of lives, and a shattered Middle East, all for a deal that hands Iran’s regime a lifeline. British security, once pegged to American resolve, now floats unmoored in a sea of diplomatic expediency.
Whitehall is said to be furious but powerless. “We’re not even at the table,” a Foreign Office source admitted. “The Americans are negotiating with the Iranians directly. We’re just being informed.” The irony is bitter. The UK, which bled for the US in Iraq, is now being sidelined as the Americans make peace with the very threat they once invaded to eliminate.
The question for London is no longer what the war was for. It’s what the next war will be for. And who will fight it alone.
