Editorial: ​There was no easy option with regard to Iran

​The decision on whether or not to strike Iran was not an easy one. Even a man as sure of his views as Donald Trump has seemed uncertain on what to do.

​The fear in everyone’s minds is a huge escalation and a conflagration that engulfs the world. And that is still possible.

But then look at the alternative.

Iran is, as even moderate European leaders have been saying, a major sponsor of terrorism and violence in the Middle East and beyond. It chants death to Israel and death to America.

It harbours Islamic extremists, indeed it sponsors very dangerous such extremist groups abroad. It has sown division and tension and been responsible for bloodshed. There is even a theory that the Iranians, post the 1979 revolution and other American foes like Osama bin Laden, concluded that the United States was weak after its withdrawal in Vietnam and indeed after the 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed more than 200 US soldiers (an attack perpetrated by people some of whom went on to become part of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah).

So these are people who understand strength and deterrence.

They are also, in the Iranian leadership, fanatical Islamists. The liberalisation in Iran, that we have been hearing about since the 1990s, never seems to arrive. A great Persian culture was sent backwards with the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and currently remains ultra reactionary in ways that its leftist, liberal defenders in the UK would never tolerate if it was Christian repression.

The prospect of Iran with a nuclear bomb is a terrifying one, given their openly professed intentions to destroy Israel, and their history of using great violence.

Whether of not the nuclear project will be halted, or even much delayed, we can only for now wait and see.