{"id":68736,"date":"2026-03-11T14:00:36","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T19:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/the-guardian-view-on-kemi-badenoch-and-the-iran-war-confusion-reveals-a-lack-of-serious-thinking-editorial\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T14:00:36","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T19:00:36","slug":"the-guardian-view-on-kemi-badenoch-and-the-iran-war-confusion-reveals-a-lack-of-serious-thinking-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/the-guardian-view-on-kemi-badenoch-and-the-iran-war-confusion-reveals-a-lack-of-serious-thinking-editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"The Guardian view on Kemi Badenoch and the Iran war: confusion reveals a lack of serious thinking | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Tories and Reform UK have abandoned British interests to become ideological satellites of radical US conservatism<\/p>\n<p>Britain is one of many countries that would benefit from the replacement of brutal theocracy with democratic government in Tehran. The Iranian people would be the biggest beneficiaries. It does not follow that British interests are served by the current US-Israeli <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/us-israel-war-on-iran\">military campaign<\/a> against Iran, which claims regime change as a goal but includes no credible strategy for achieving it.<\/p>\n<p>The distinction was never hard to grasp. Sir\u00a0Keir\u00a0Starmer understood it and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/live\/2026\/mar\/02\/raf-cyprus-yvette-cooper-keir-starmer-us-iran-israel-uk-politics-latest-news\">kept his distance<\/a> from Donald Trump\u2019s war. The leader of the opposition was not so judicious. In the first week of the conflict, Kemi\u00a0Badenoch accused Sir Keir of indecision and cowardice. She thought the absence of a legal mandate for war was irrelevant and called for the RAF to be more involved. The Conservative leader no longer holds that\u00a0view. Or, rather, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2026\/mar\/10\/badenoch-denies-calling-for-uk-to-join-us-israeli-war-on-iran\">she denies<\/a> having held it. She says that she did not call for Britain to join the US-Israeli action, but did call for British forces to strike targets inside Iran and that those are different things, although she struggles to explain how.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2026\/mar\/11\/the-guardian-view-on-kemi-badenoch-and-the-iran-war-confusion-reveals-a-lack-of-serious-thinking\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Tories and Reform UK have abandoned British interests to become ideological satellites of radical US conservatism Britain is one of many countries that would benefit from the replacement of brutal theocracy with democratic government in Tehran. The Iranian people would be the biggest beneficiaries. It does not follow that British interests are served by &#8230; <a title=\"The Guardian view on Kemi Badenoch and the Iran war: confusion reveals a lack of serious thinking | Editorial\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/the-guardian-view-on-kemi-badenoch-and-the-iran-war-confusion-reveals-a-lack-of-serious-thinking-editorial\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Guardian view on Kemi Badenoch and the Iran war: confusion reveals a lack of serious thinking | Editorial\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}