A beautiful day in an ugly world just doesn’t cut it anymore. Blue skies feel like an insult. Sunlight, once a balm, now stings. Ask a Gazan whose family is mown down at a food distribution site under a cloudless sky. Beauty mocks. Horror endures. Sunshine doesn’t cleanse the blood.

And then, beneath that same sun, the US bombed Iran.

No longer hypothetical. No longer curling like a threat through the corridors of power. The escalation many feared had arrived, with those black origami-like stealth bombers reigniting US militarism in the region in a way no one could any longer pretend was dormant. Violence is real. Its consequences, vast.

Even an attendant nation like the UK stood at a threshold, with history and its own people watching. Despite 20 alleged Iranian plots on UK soil of late, the country was immediately taking a non-violent stance—urging talks at every turn.

Two days before those B-2s flew, a moment of diplomacy—some said hypocrisy—still lingered. Leading Hezbollah commander Mohammad Ahmad Khreiss had just been assassinated in Lebanon. This was as UK, French, and German foreign ministers met Iran’s Abbas Araqchi in Geneva, Araqchi reiterating Iran’s willingness to return to nuclear negotiations. ‘Europe’s not gonna be able to help on this one,’ warned an unimpressed Trump, MAGA-capped at Morristown, New Jersey. And Tulsi Gabbard still couldn’t get a meeting anywhere.

Suddenly, though, Gaza and Iran were both facing the full force of Israeli firepower, in Iran’s case with serious US back-up. Soroka Hospital in Beersheba—no deaths confirmed the first time—must have feared renewed attacks. The chessboard had been knocked over. Diplomatic pieces lay scattered. Strategic logic had given way to raw escalation.

Iran had its own dark ledger—destabilising neighbours while stifling reform at home. That charge was echoed back towards Netanyahu’s government, which escalated with the killing of Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, in Qom. That was before the B-2s flew and therefore before a hastily declared ceasefire and later presidential F-word. Nor was Izadi’s killing a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme but the product of a broader, more powerful, institutional memory.

Netanyahu’s complaint that his son’s wedding had again been cancelled due to missile threats—‘a personal cost for his fiancée as well, and I must say that my dear wife is a hero’—may have been intended to humanise the crisis. But some were already calling his Iran strikes either politically expedient or downright survivalist. On the ground, of course, it was not about such optics. It was about lives.

A mother in Rafah or Isfahan, pulling her child into the shadow of a stairwell. Fathers digging with bare hands through rubble, searching for a shoe, a breath, a limb. As in Gaza, these were not strategists. They were not combatants. They had no place in the war room. Only in the wreckage.

Every strike echoes—in neo-natal wards without power, in schools flattened by miscalculation, in aforementioned breadlines turned bloodbaths. The language of ‘proportionality’ and ‘deterrence’ cannot translate the sound of a child calling for their dead sibling. Civilians are not a footnote. They are the story. And the truth bears repeating because it keeps being ignored: it is always the voiceless who suffer most.

Trump, with the bluster of a person delivering a shock sales pitch, was demanding Iran’s ‘complete and total surrender.’ Pandora’s box was open. This was no flashpoint. It was a chain reaction. One US analyst I knew remarked that Iran could—if pushed further—invade Iraq and unite the Shia population across both sides of the border, a community already empowered by the previous Iraq War.

This didn’t begin with Trump walking out of the JCPOA in 2017. Nor with Netanyahu’s targeted assassinations. To understand this escalation, we have to return to 1953—the year the British and the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s elected government and install the Shah. In the aftermath, the CIA—with some help from Mossad—helped build SAVAK, the Shah’s brutal secret police, one of whose torture methods—the ‘Apollo’—involved placing a metal bucket over a prisoner’s head and beating it until their screams bounced back like a mass screech of lunar static.

This was the architecture of betrayal that made today possible.

For the UK, watching from the edge, things already felt weirdly different now. There was still a choice. Appetite for direct involvement was limited to a few sabre-rattling Tory MPs chasing relevance. ‘Let the US and Israel do this themselves,’ one ex-military Brit told me. And he was right. Why should the UK join a war it didn’t start, can’t direct, and will never end? Harold Wilson declined one with Vietnam. Polls showed no public appetite for escalation.

Meanwhile Cabinet Minister Jonathan Reynolds confirmed over the weekend that the UK had no operational role in the strikes, but was informed in advance. He also had to admit that the risk of domestic terrorism had increased. Everyone knew this didn’t make the UK neutral. The UK may not have launched any of the missiles, but would almost certainly have supported in undeclared ways—through intelligence sharing, logistics, diplomatic cover. Theirs was a quiet bargain: let others take the heat while they held the flashlight.

And the UK is overstretched. Ukraine and Russia continue to drain military and political resources. That war, too, might have ended in Istanbul—had more people listened at a similar stage.

The UK priority had been to keep its Tehran embassy open. By Friday, evacuation had been ordered. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer—under pressure at home—continued to be viewed as measured abroad. Legal advice from Attorney General Lord Hermer had reportedly warned him that UK strikes on Iran would breach international law. That advice was leaked. The mole was being hunted. Starmer meanwhile had continued to call for a return to negotiations. His critics said he was being too quiet. It was refreshing to others having a leader who did not beat the drums of war the whole time. They saw that quiet as strength.

As Auden wrote, ‘We must love one another or die.’ But even Auden disowned the line. And so too must we disown the romance of intervention.

This was not a drill. There was no Berlin Wall. No Kennedy with a quip and a cigar. Only brittle alliances, confusion, and oil tankers still drifting like giant ghosts on their back through the Gulf. For now, the Strait of Hormuz remained open—if only because China needed it to.

If the UK had joined the fighting, the theatre would have begun by now: flag-draped podiums, yet another ‘coalition of the willing,’ and a media narrative already written. The special relationship, even with a fresh trade deal, would have revealed wear. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And the 24-hour news cycle is our opiate. Once upon a time Hunter S. Thompson would have spat in the bin and called this kind of thing madness dressed in chrome. Wolfe would’ve renamed The Right Stuff as The Right PR.

Today, UK military bandwidth is overstretched. Even the latest defence review may be deemed out of date by this. Direct involvement would only expose our troops, our infrastructure, and our citizens to potential retaliation—not just in the Gulf, but at home. Cyberattacks. Worse. (They may happen anyway.) Iraq’s ghost is still with us. Another war with shadowy intelligence and vague pretexts? It would be political folly. Moral failure.

Besides, the IAEA’s Rafael Grossi, despite Iranian criticism of him, maintained there was no current evidence Iran was developing nuclear weapons. Senior Iranian official Ali Shamkhani, just days before his assassination, had said Iran would ‘never have a nuclear weapon’ and wanted ‘better relations with the US.’ Regardless, any use of such weapons would surely guarantee Iran’s destruction. And yet he was killed. The JCPOA was not just suspended—it was entombed.

The Gulf nations are still watching—many already drifting eastward. Qatar once hit became a brief, oddly meaningless, part of the theatre. At the end of the day, each initial attack drove oil prices higher, pushed alliances to the edge, and gave Vladimir Putin cause to grin behind his freshly scrubbed hands.

And still, to do nothing was not a strategy. The UK had options: quiet diplomacy, backchannels, coordinated pressure. Realpolitik, yes—but not blood. This was not cowardice. It was calculation.

The region is still a powder keg. History is still a poor extinguisher. As Jagger sang, ‘Rape, murder—it’s just a shot away.’ There are no good wars. Only necessary ones. And this was not one.

So if more strikes must come, let them come without us. We know, all too well, that what burns in war is not only infrastructure, but memory, trust, and future. What breaks today may never be whole again.

The sky, however blue, will not forgive.  And neither will history—we should know—if we chase borrowed glory into another avoidable inferno.

The post This Is Not a Drill: Why the UK had to Say No to War with Iran   appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.