Comment by flumpcakes
17 hours ago
The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs like Russia, or diplomacy through violence. In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability or incoming missiles. So no, it is in fact the defense sector.
What countries have a defense sector, if the UK doesn't?
Iraq and Afghanistan might disagree with your first point.
Last time I looked Iran and the UK are quite some distance from each other, and Iran has inexplicably neither been launching missiles at the UK, nor threatening to, and is apparently not even capable of it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm120x4lzxo
So the justification for these "defensive" bombing runs on Iranian mountain sites from Fairford remains mysterious.
The UK's arms industry is - like most things associated with the establishment - an exercise in turning privilege into cash, so it's not a surprise to see Senior Figures doing the media rounds in establishment narrative factories like The Telegraph and The Daily Mail.
Readers with the money and connections to make a difference already know how the game is played.
Readers who don't should perhaps be allowed to keep their happy fantasy that the UK isn't one of the most corrupt countries in the world, as a mercy.
Iran attacked the British base in Cyprus with drones so has directly attacked British territory. Iran has also been sponsoring terrorism in the UK. Iran has also attacked an American base on British territory.
> one of the most corrupt countries in the world
A ridiculous exaggeration given what a lot of other countries are like.
> Iran attacked the British base in Cyprus with drones so has directly attacked British territor
Oh, you mean that base the UK had let the US use for its attacks on Iran?
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/2/starmer-lets-us-...
> Iran has also been sponsoring terrorism in the UK.
You remind me of that 'Yes Prime Minister' episode when Hacker and Humphrey decided to announce they were expelling so-many Soviet diplomatic staff because they were supposedly engaged in espionage.
Helping the aggressor with its offense or defense during the aggressive acts is taking part in the aggression. States have international obligation to not engage in or promote aggression and to not take part in it. UK voluntarily took this obligation on itself.
I guess it's debatable whether the drone attack was proportional. I'd say that attack on clearly military installation of active ally is proportionate. Bombing bases in Britain would be more appropriate I think, since that's where the bombers that attacked Iran flew from and were loaded with weapons.
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Iran has been funding terrorist networks who are active in the UK and has taken direct action against UK citizens before on numerous occasions.
They are also allied with Russia who are doing the same.
They aren't some innocent party here. Geopolitics is complicated and not some black and white good guy bad guy mechanics.
To add some pretty hard data to this: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/fiona-and-irans-role-in-the-...
> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability or incoming missiles.
Claiming that the UK doesn't support diplomacy through violence then transitioning into this gem has to be one of the wildest juxtapositions I've seen this year. Do you classify the US strikes on Iran as uniformly offensive or defensive in nature? Or do you think there is a mix? How would you classify a US bombing run on anti-air defences in the opening phase of the conflict?
The UK has only allowed the US to use their air bases to strike Iranian offensive capability and intercept missiles launched towards middle eastern cities. Iran bombed an airport in Kuwait yesterday, for example.
It's pretty obvious how the the UK's actions vs. Iran's, or even the US's, are different.
Yeah, "striking offensive capability" of a country is aggression and the country that strikes, and it's helpers are all aggressors and in the wrong as far as intl. law goes. You need to work on understanding how causality works. What happened yesterday has no bearing on what happened 2 months ago.
If UK/US wanted to be in the in the clear they could have asked UNSC to authorize use of force against Iran.
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> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability ...
Reminds of the old joke, "What propaganda? We don't have propaganda."
Iran.
It didn't attack anyone until it was attacked.
It has been defending itself.
Iran attacked countries that played absolutely no role in the US and Israel’s attack on it, including some (like Oman) that have been fairly closely allied to the regime.
That goes far beyond what’s permissible in international law in response to an attack.
In my view the US and Israeli attacks on Iran were illegal, reprehensible, and deeply stupid. But that doesn’t mean Iran is allowed to do whatever it wants afterward, especially to countries not directly involved in hostilities. In this case Iran has also broken international law.
They have been trying to kill people in the UK for years. And have been funding proxies everywhere, some of whom have attacked the UK. We're not really even involved and I find it hard to agree with this point.
However it should have been dealt with earlier rather than latent bombing.
You could easily be describing the UK, Israel, and the USA, lol.
Anyway, I live in the UK, and I don't swallow the same propaganda as you.
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I can't tell if your first sentence is a joke or not...
> In the current Iranian war the UK is only allowing it's bases to launch defensive missions, i.e. strike offensive capability
If Iran struck all of the UK's missile factories and military bases, would it be considered a defensive or offensive action?
Context matters. Did the UK start a war with Iran? Or did the UK decide to hit surrounding countries (France, Norway, Netherlands, etc.) to destabilise the region and target an Iranian airbase in Spain?
I would assume there's a bunch of countries around Iran that appreciate UK's help in intercepting missiles.
I would assume there's a bunch of countries around Iran that don't appreciate the US starting a war of choice.
Defending those launching illegal strikes is still offensive, in both meanings of the term.
The UK was defending its allies who had not launched illegal strikes, but were themselves attacked by Iran in contravention of international law.
war is peace etc etc
"Department of War" was renamed as "Department of Defense" because Edward Bernays (the greatest propagandist who ever lived) said so.
Maybe not directly. In 1947, it became the Department of the Army, and in 1949 the Department of Defense. Bernays was working on Engineering of Consent at the time, and applied psychoanalysis was very subtle compared to simple Orwellian name changes. For example, Bernays wanted to get women to smoke cigarettes.
>The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs
It has centuries of exactly that at a global scale, and continued post-war neo-colonial land grabbing and pressuring, plus eager participation in all the imperialist games of its larger brother.
I mean, just mentioning "Tony Blair" is enough...
20 years since he was in power...
What land did Tony Blair grab? You can disagree with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq without making the exaggerated claim that this was part of some kind of long-term imperialist occupation. The UK currently has fewer military personnel in Iraq than it has in, say, Germany. And Britain doesn’t control the Iraqi government.
>What land did Tony Blair grab? You can disagree with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq without making the exaggerated claim that this was part of some kind of long-term imperialist occupation.
Yeah, just a few decades years, to secure oil deals and/or keep control of the region. No biggie.
That this can be said with a straight face about invasions to two countries that created civil war, suffering, hundreds of thousands of deaths, displacement, etc, is telling of the ever-present colonialist mindset.
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I think something Brits don't fully understand is the extent of our vassalage under the US.
We do, as you rightly note have quite the history of a policy of imperialist land grabs, now we just play a support function to somebody else's empire.
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>The British empire has been completely wound down, other than a handful of small overseas territories.
Just because Britain couldn't afford it anymore. And after bloodshed, in India, Kenya, Cyprus, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Not out of the bigness of their heart.
And the post-colonialism never ended. The same grabby hands get everywhere they can get.
And why exactly are those "small overseas territories" unquestionably retained? "No biggie, just an island here, an island there, and island there, some land in here"
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> The UK doesn't have some imperialist policy of land grabs
Not directly, mostly; and not through land grabs. The age of land grabs is pretty much over - but imperialism lives on in different form - including massive military interventions and covert operations for manipulating or replacing regimes, more that properly conquering and settling lands.
Today's UK is not an independent empire of this kind. It used to be; but now it is relegated to being a junior partner in its alliance with the US empire, mostly, and with the EU, to a lesser extent. This is reflected in its top 10 arms recipients, e.g. for 2024 [1]:
Saudi Arabia, £14bn United States of America, £8.3bn France, £5.2bn Qatar, £3.5bn Italy, £2.8bn Oman, £2.5bn Turkey, £2.3bn India, £2.3bn Norway, £2.2bn United Arab Emirates, £1.7bn
and there are also arms Israel for about £0.572bn; and the arming of Ukraine, a cooperation with both the US and European powers, as part of NATO's struggle against Russia.
The UK also sends troops as part of US imperial interventions, e.g. in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. There are also UK-dominated or UK-only interventions abroad, but mostly if we go a few decades back [2].
[1] : https://www.thenational.scot/news/24272310.uk-arms-exports--...
[2] : https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-uks-83-military-intervent...
Defensive missions? Was the UK under attack?
The UK has allies in the region. Kuwait was bombed just yesterday. And a UK airbase was targeted.
Are you arguing that the entire world should never provide aid to other countries? Surely you're just calling for imperialist powers to gobble up the planet piece by piece.
I guess schoolgirls were naughty and saying bad words about the UK, hence arming the American planes with bombs to use on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
They still own Falkland Islands.
Who "owned" it before? There were no people on that land before it was settled.
I don’t know terribly much about it. Wikipedia says that the British Government decided to colonize it in 1840.
Why did British people decide to move from the Northern Hemisphere to this island? Because the climate looked similar?
And yes, here is a dispute between a historically imperialist versus a settler state. It’s weird.
You are quite the hypocrite to call the UK not a imperialistic country. They are probably the greatest of them all. They have far more blood on their hands in foreign interventions than Russia and China combined. In fact they are still occupied with abuse and destruction throughout the world. You are naive and victim of propoganda for not seeing this.
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