Picture it: a room full of British analysts, their faces the colour of boiled kippers, their fingers stained with the ink of a thousand failed predictions. They have gathered not for tea, biscuits, and the gentle hum of mutual admiration, but to demand something far more precious: transparency. And leading the charge, the bull in the geopolitical china shop, is none other than the BBC's diplomatic editor, James Bowen.
His question, delivered with the force of a gin-addled uppercut to the solar plexus of Western foreign policy: 'US-Iran deal: what was the war for?' It hangs in the air like the ghost of a bad decision, the spectre of a trillion dollars and countless lives that now feels rather... pointless.
One imagines the spooks in Langley scrabbling for the manual on 'How to Explain a War That Ended in a Handshake.' But there is no manual. There is only the queasy realisation that the entire edifice of sanctions, threats, and 'axis of evil' rhetoric may have been nothing more than a particularly expensive and deadly game of three-card monte played with human lives.
The analysts, bless their cotton socks, are now demanding a full accounting. They want to know: was it for oil? Regime change?
A vague sense of patriotic entitlement? Or was it, as I suspect, all just a grand distraction from the fact that the world's superpowers are actually just a collection of overgrown adolescents with nukes and poor impulse control? The irony is as thick as London smog.
For years, the rallying cry was 'no deal with the enemy.' And now, with a deal in sight, the question becomes: why did we not do this sooner? Why the blood?
Why the treasure? Why the endless parade of talking heads on news programmes assuring us that war was the only option? The answer, delivered from the barstool of history, is that war is always the option for those too lazy to negotiate.
So, Mr. Bowen, keep asking. Keep prodding.
Because if the price of peace is a little awkward truth-telling about the past, then let us drink to the transparency that may finally allow us to sleep at night, free from the howling ghosts of interventions gone sour. Cheers.
