On the question of the US’s recent ‘deep’ bombing of Iran, I’m torn between, firstly, my old 1960s CND views – nuclear weapons were one of the two main targets of my political activism then (the other was South African apartheid) – and secondly, my more recent hostility to American-backed Zionism; the latter of which didn’t really impinge on me until the Palestinians became such sorry victims of it in recent years. (Of course they had been victims before then, but not such public ones.) That Iran should be deprived of the ability to build an H- (or is it an A-?) bomb conformed to that 1960s principle, or prejudice; but then my more recent opposition to Trump, and to American bullying, clearly runs across that, and in the case of the present Middle East war makes it difficult for me to decide whose side I’m on. Stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Or stop the awful Donald in his tracks? Can you have both?

Currently doubts are being expressed as to whether the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities really were as effective as Trump claimed; or as necessary, in view of Trump’s ditching of an earlier – peaceful – nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term.. ‘Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.’ That was how he put it at the time. Claims on the other side that the Iranians had already moved much of their nuclear ‘stuff’ to deeper sites elsewhere, so that their plans had been put back for only a couple of months – consequently making Trump’s ‘success’ far from the absolute one that he was boasting – were dismissed by him in his characteristic way as ‘fake news’, by ‘low IQ’ commentators, designed to minimise his personal achievement, and hence his hopes of winning a Nobel peace prize.  (The fact of Obama’s having got one has clearly stung his inflated amour propre.)

However, if these doubts turn out to be justified, then it will make it easier for us to choose sides. Support for Trump (and for Netanyahu) depends on Iran’s nuclear ambitions really having been ‘obliterated’ by the US’s  ‘bunker-busting’ bombs; in which case we old CND marchers can give them our support. We’ll have to hold our noses to do it, in view of the awfulness of both men; but the security of the world against the threat of nuclear Armageddon must take priority. If on the other hand the action turns out to be a relative failure, not achieving its stated objective, and possibly making things even worse in the Middle East, as Bush’s and Blair’s grand adventure in Iraq turned out to, then we can confidently stick to our anti-American (or rather anti-Trump) guns.

This is one of those occasions when we need to see how things turn out before we can judge. Personally I’ll feel pretty devastated if Trump’s ‘art of the deal’ actually works in this crucial and complex area of international diplomacy. But that’s preferable to the entire Middle East’s being devastated, rather more literally.