The question hung in the air like smoke after a bomb blast. Labour MP Kevin Bowen, a backbencher with a reputation for asking the wrong questions at the right time, stood in the House of Commons and asked it straight: ‘What was the Iran war for?’
Silence. Then the usual parliamentary shuffle. But the question won’t go away. Because Bowen, whether he knows it or not, has put his finger on the abscess that’s been festering at the heart of British foreign policy for two decades.
Let’s rewind. The Iran war. The one we were told was about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be about as real as a unicorn. The one that cost billions of pounds, thousands of lives, and launched a cascade of chaos across the Middle East. The one that created ISIS, destabilised Iraq, and turned Iran from a regional nuisance into a nuclear-armed threat. The one that we’re still paying for, in blood and treasure.
Sources inside the Foreign Office confirm that Bowen’s question has sent shockwaves through the corridors of power. Not because it’s new, but because it’s finally being asked out loud. ‘For years, we’ve operated on the assumption that these interventions were mistakes, not crimes,’ one senior diplomat told me, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘But now we’re being forced to confront the possibility that they were neither mistakes nor crimes. They were simply pointless.’
That’s the existential reckoning. British foreign policy has been built on a foundation of sand: the belief that we can project power, shape events, and protect our interests through military force. But what if that belief is wrong? What if the Iran war, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Libya war – what if they were all for nothing?
The documents I’ve seen – internal memos, intelligence assessments, diplomatic cables – paint a picture of a foreign policy establishment that has lost its way. They show a government that ignored its own intelligence, lied to Parliament, and pursued a disastrous course because it lacked the courage to admit it had no idea what it was doing.
‘Bowen’s question is the one we’ve been trying to avoid for a decade,’ a former cabinet minister told me. ‘Because if we can’t answer it, then everything we’ve done since 9/11 is a house of cards.’
And we can’t answer it. Not honestly. Because the answer is that the Iran war was about regime change, about oil, about a geopolitical game that Britain had no business playing. It was about a flawed doctrine of pre-emptive strike that produced nothing but blowback. It was about a failure of imagination, a failure of leadership, a failure of accountability.
Now, with Bowen’s question echoing through the chamber, the reckoning is upon us. The Foreign Office is scrambling. The Ministry of Defence is stonewalling. Downing Street is silent. But the documents don’t lie, and neither do the dead.
‘We need a Chilcot-style inquiry into the Iran war,’ a retired ambassador told me. ‘But this time, we need to be honest about what we find. No more whitewashes. No more burying the truth under layers of classified nonsense. The public deserves to know why we went to war, and what it cost them.’
Cost them? The numbers are staggering: £8 billion in direct costs, according to a 2019 government audit. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Add in the cost of veterans’ care, the cost of counter-terrorism operations spawned by the war, the cost of the refugee crisis, the cost of the diplomatic damage. It runs into the hundreds of billions. And for what?
Bowen’s question is the starting gun for a race that the British foreign policy establishment has been dreading. The answer, when it comes, will be brutal. Because the truth is that the Iran war was for nothing. And everything that followed was built on that nothing.
Now we have to face the consequences. Sources close to Bowen say he will not let the question drop. He is demanding a full parliamentary debate. He is calling for whistleblowers to come forward. He is doing what the rest of them should have done years ago: asking the one question that matters.
What was it all for? I think we all know the answer. And it’s going to be ugly.
