This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

As everything that President Donald Trump says seems to be the opposite of the truth, it comes as no surprise that his jibe about Sir Keir Starmer not being in the mould of Winston Churchill came just as Starmer was for once showing some Churchillian resolve in opposition to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

In terms of moral depravity and deliberate inhumanity, the ongoing attack on Iran may soon rival the destruction of Gaza and its people as the war crime of the century. As with Gaza, the true objective is not to eliminate a toxic leadership, but to batter a whole society into submission.

In this scenario, Iran is to be removed as a player from the geopolitical map of the Middle East by triggering state collapse and national fragmentation. Only the most partisan or naive will be persuaded by feel-good talk from the US and Israel about the goal of this merciless air campaign being to free the Iranian people from their theocratic chains. Rejecting such hypocrisy, the US Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth, boasted on Wednesday that the US was winning the war “decisively, devastatingly and without mercy”.

As occurred so often in Gaza, the grim meaning of this approach was made appallingly clear by the long line of coffins of the 175 children and staff killed by an air strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab in southern Iran. The US has yet to accept blame, but analysis by The New York Times suggests it was hit during US strikes on a nearby naval base.

At some point in this conflict, an armchair pundit will come up with the hackneyed saying often misattributed to the great French diplomat Talleyrand, that what we are seeing is “worse than a crime, it is a mistake”. But such cheap cynicism and pretended realpolitik is entirely incorrect: political mistakes are often forgiven or forgotten, but not moral failings on matters of life and death. Tony Blair’s reputation was forever tainted in the eyes of the public by his decision to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Starmer and his Government were lastingly damaged by their complicity in the horrors of the Gaza war.

But there is a further reason why the UK Government should distance itself from the war. For a long time, I was wary of describing the Trump administration as fascist because fascism means for many the violent, populist, nationalist and despotic version espoused by Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in the 1930s. During his first term in the White House, Trump belonged rather to a category of semi-fascist leaders which includes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Turkish President Recep........

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