SARAH VINE: The prospect of armed battle ought to terrify each sane individual. But generally excessive evil leaves us with no selection

Over 30 years ago, I remember watching TV footage of the first bombing raids over Iraq as the US-led Operation Desert Storm – the response to Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait – swung into action.

I was 22, the same age as my own daughter now, and politically very naive. I had never seen scenes like it and had no real understanding of the region or the forces at play.

I just knew that it looked damn scary, and it frightened me.

Yesterday, I woke to a similar feeling of foreboding as footage of Israeli-American strikes on Iran flooded the internet. Only now, 35 years on, I have a clearer grasp of the context, and the layers of complexity that underpin the decision to strike at the heart of Iran’s ruling regime.

The prospect of armed conflict still terrifies me, as it does every sane person, but sometimes extreme evil leaves no choice.

There is no definitive figure on the number of Iranian civilians who have been slaughtered in the latest uprising.

The Iranian government’s official tally is just over 3,000, but most human rights organisations agree that this is just a fraction of the true death toll, which is more likely around 40,000, very possibly more. 

That does not, of course, include those who have been tortured, injured, maimed or raped. That number is in the region of 330,000. Estimates of those detained are around 50,000.

Remember, all these figures refer simply to the recent uprisings. God only knows how many have been massacred since the regime took over in 1979.

Back then, Iran was a sophisticated, prosperous secular society, with a thriving middle class. True, it was far from perfect: the Shah was an authoritarian figure, and there was widespread inequality, especially between the urban elites and rural areas.

Still, the country was doing relatively well. Iranians are an exceptional people. They excel in medicine, music, art and philosophy. 

Their culinary skills are famous throughout the world. Where there is a Persian diaspora you will find people of great dignity and integrity. And great food.

For almost 50 years that spirit has been crushed. This is a regime that hangs teenagers from cranes, deliberately shoots protesters in the eyes and throws women in jail for not wearing the right clothes.

It is a hardline Islamist government that believes in total suppression of personal freedom, and practises a form of intractable Sharia law that, among other things, discriminates viciously against women and girls.

True, it is more sophisticated than other Islamist regimes, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, where women have been stripped of all their rights and are now reduced to the status of slaves and brood mares. But the fundamentals are the same.

The Iranian people have shown immense courage and determination in resisting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his army of thugs. 

But the truth is, they face a Goliath they can never defeat alone. And that is why, hard as it is, it is right to intervene. Not just because their bravery deserves our support, but because we share a common enemy.

The regime doesn’t just terrorise its own people, it also exports its brand of Islamist oppression, poverty, sectarian division and misogyny throughout the Arab world and beyond.

Tehran armed and cheered on the October 7 attacks; it has direct links to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to militias in Iraq and Syria.

If you believe, as I do, that Islamism is a threat to civilised society, to a way of life that allows freedom of speech and religious expression and rejects the mistreatment of women and minorities, then the Islamic Republic has shown itself to be a very big part of that threat.

No one lightly chooses military action. I truly cannot think of anything worse. Except, perhaps, allowing such an evil to grow unchecked in the world.

Sometimes in life you have to take a stand. Sometimes you have to fight for what is right, no matter how frightening it may seem or how many people hate you for it.

History’s great leaders have always known that. Churchill, for example, understood that, not that it does him any favours in this modern world, as we saw last week with the desecration of his statue in Parliament Square.

Nevertheless, he led our country in a fight against a great tyranny. The cost in human lives was incalculable – but the alternative, as those who bore witness to the horrors of the Nazi regime saw, would have been worse.

There are no good decisions in politics, only less bad ones. The choice the West faces now is simple: tolerate the mass murder, torture and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of defenceless people across the Middle East, turn a blind eye to the credo that despises and seeks to destroy our way of life, watch as brave young men and women sacrifice their lives in vain – or try to put a stop to it.

There are only two ways to deal with a bully: stand up to them or join them. The former is far harder than the latter.

In Britain today and across America there are far more people who would rather join the bullies than stand up to them, as we see endlessly in the hate-fuelled faces of pro-Palestinian protesters tearing down pictures of Jewish hostages, in the hero-worship of Hamas, in the number of useful idiots parroting Islamist propaganda on our airwaves.

These voices don’t really care about the people of Gaza. The dead are just cannon-fodder for their ideological fervour. 

To them human suffering is all just fuel for their political propaganda. If they were truly motivated by humanitarian concerns, they would march against all atrocities, including the slaughter of Iranians by their own regime, the enslavement of women and girls in Afghanistan, the genocide in Sudan and Putin’s atrocious war crimes in Ukraine.

But no, they care about suffering only when it suits their political narrative. That is why they will be vehemently opposed to this move by Israel and America. 

If this intervention succeeds, it will undermine their whole world view, not to mention make life very hard for their heroes Hamas and Hezbollah and the whole ‘from the river to the sea’ brigade.

It’s important to remember that there are many Muslims who loathe extremist Islam even more so than non-Muslims do. One of the biggest threats to the spread of radical Islam across the globe is a functioning, democratic Iran.

So helping the people of Iran reclaim their country could begin that transformation.

But in many ways military intervention is the easy part: far harder is the recovery, making sure that one evil is not replaced by another, as is the case in Afghanistan.

Iran, though, is not Afghanistan, nor Syria. The people of Iran are united in their fervent desire to depose the regime. All over the world, there are displaced Iranians who want nothing more than to return to their homeland and help rebuild their once great nation.

On Friday, I had lunch with one of them, an old school friend. I asked her how her family was faring back home. ‘They’re OK for the time being,’ she said. ‘Watching the warships getting closer and closer, waiting – and hoping.’

Let us pray that hope becomes a reality.