Jeremy Bowen’s question hangs over the White House like a ghost: what was the war for? Today’s US-Iran deal doesn’t just reset diplomacy. It lays bare the human cost of a conflict that should never have been. For the families of the 3,000 British troops sent to Iraq, the price was paid in sleepless nights and flag-draped coffins. For the millions of Iranians under sanctions, the price was empty shelves and a currency that forgot how to hold its value. And for the American taxpayer, the price was two trillion dollars: money that could have rebuilt the crumbling roads of Manchester, the leaky roofs of Glasgow.
Labour voters who marched against the invasion in 2003 know this truth. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction. They remember the soldiers who came home with limbs missing and minds broken. Now, with the deal done, the establishment will call it a victory. But victory for whom? Not for the steelworker in Sheffield who lost his job when the economy buckled. Not for the nurse in Liverpool who watched her hospital budget slashed as defence spending soared.
The agreement is a diplomatic achievement, no doubt. But let us not dress it in flags. This is a belated admission of failure. A stitched-up wound over a cancer that should have been prevented. Bowen, as ever, cuts through the rhetoric to ask the painful question: what was achieved that could not have been achieved without the bloodshed? The answer, for the working people of this country, is nothing.
They will not feel a penny richer. They will not sleep easier knowing that the deal might hold. Because the scars of the war are still open: the inequality it deepened, the distrust it sowed, the lives it wasted. And until we answer Bowen’s question honestly, the folly of the deadliest kind will remain unlearned.
