The War Didn't Start on February 28

The selective outrage over Iran, Carney's caucus-driven walkback, and why the framing matters more than the missiles

Nobody invoked international law when Hamas crossed a sovereign border on October 7, 2023.

Nobody marched when the Iranian regime massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens in January — the largest and deadliest crackdown in the country's modern history, met with live ammunition, executions, and the longest internet blackout on record. Three separate UN bodies — the Fact-Finding Mission, the Special Rapporteur, and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — independently concluded that Iran is committing crimes against humanity. Against its own people. Children as young as seven confirmed as victims.

And yet the moment the US and Israel launched strikes on February 28, the international law chorus showed up right on cue. Suddenly, the rules matter again.

I’ve been struck — genuinely struck — by how the entire conversation has been framed around that date. As if the conflict began when Western powers acted, and everything before it was just background noise. That framing does real work. It turns the aggressor into the victim. It makes the response look like the provocation. And it lets a lot of people off the hook for ignoring what this regime has been doing for 47 years.

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Andrew and I dug into this on this week’s episode of Craft Politics, and I want to pull on the thread a bit more here.

There are two distinct oppositions to this war, and they’re very different in character. On the right — particularly the American right — the objection is pragmatic. Cost, overreach, American interests, a reaction to electing a president who wasn’t supposed to meddle in foreign conflicts. You can disagree with that position, but at least it’s coherent. It’s an argument about strategy and priorities.

The opposition on the left is something else entirely. It’s framed as a moral argument — but it’s a moral argument that somehow casts the Iranian regime as the victim. And that is a problem I can’t get past.

This is a regime that accuses America and Israel of being imperialist while running its own proxy empire across Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq. A regime that has hijacked a Persian civilisation dating back millennia — 7,000 years of history captured by a 47-year-old transplant that enjoys somewhere between 10 and 15% domestic support, depending on which polls you trust. A regime whose charter is explicit about exporting its revolution across the Middle East, which requires — in their own framing — the elimination of Israel.

And so-called anti-imperialists want to defend this.

I find it genuinely confusing. Not in the way where I’m pretending to be confused for rhetorical effect — I mean I have sat with this and tried to understand how someone who claims to care about human rights can watch a regime hang gay men from cranes in public squares and then show up to march against the people trying to take that regime apart. The best explanation I’ve landed on is the one Andrew put bluntly on the show: there’s a hierarchy of evil, and at the top of it is Western colonialism. Everything else gets filtered through that lens. If the West does it, it’s imperialism. If someone else does it — no matter how brutal — well, you have to understand the context.

That filter explains a lot. It explains why October 7 produced calls for “context” rather than condemnation. It explains why the regime’s massacre of its own citizens in January barely registered in Western discourse. And it explains why, the moment the US and Israel act, international law becomes sacred ground.

As Andrew said — and he’s right — it would be lovely if international law worked and was respected. But we’re in a situation where the only people following it are the nations that aren’t acting despotically. The regime doesn’t respect international law. It weaponises it. It uses our commitment to rules against us, knowing that every Western response will be met with a chorus of legal objections that its own behaviour never triggers.

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This brings me to Mark Carney, whose response to this war has been — I’ll be charitable — uneven.

On Day 1, his statement was clear, decisive, and among the most hawkish of any world leader. I was genuinely surprised. "Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security." That's not hedging. That's a position.

And then, within 72 hours, the walkback began. Anand called for de-escalation. McGuinty called for a ceasefire. Carney himself, pressed on it in Australia, said he supported the mission “with regret.” Three officials, three positions, in three days. Then another reversal — he couldn’t rule out military involvement. Then another shift in tone.

My best guess is the initial statement was genuine conviction, and the walkback was caucus management. Some version of senior Liberals looking at that statement and saying: what the hell, we weren’t expecting that. And from there, the operating system kicked in — soften the position, triangulate, find something that keeps the caucus together even if it makes no sense to anyone watching from the outside.

The problem is Carney has built his brand on being the right person for a crisis. This is the crisis. And the government’s response looked less like strategic deliberation and more like making it up as they went along.

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The Keir Starmer parallel is worse, honestly. Andrew — who served as a Conservative MP for over a decade — was genuinely embarrassed by the UK response. Starmer initially refused to let the US use British bases, then reversed course after Iranian retaliatory strikes hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and put British personnel across the Gulf at risk. He published legal advice suggesting the initial US-Israeli strikes didn’t meet the self-defence threshold. He told Parliament the UK doesn’t believe in “regime change from the skies.”

Trump called him “not Winston Churchill.” That landed because it was true.

The damage to the special relationship is real. Gulf allies who have historically looked to the UK as a stabilising presence were apparently frustrated by the absence. And the image of American bombers operating from British bases while the British government insisted it wasn’t really participating — that’s not a sustainable position. It’s a legal fiction that everyone can see through.

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I don’t know how this war ends. Trump is calling it a “little excursion” while his Defence Secretary promises the most intense day of strikes yet. Iran has named a hardline successor who signals defiance, not negotiation. Israel appears to be racing to inflict maximum damage before the political window closes.

What I do know is that the framing matters. If we keep treating February 28 as the start of this story, we’ll keep having the wrong conversation — one where the regime gets to play the victim and the people who’ve suffered under it for half a century get erased from the picture.

The war didn’t start on February 28. It started a long time ago. We just weren’t paying attention.

This essay draws from this week’s episode of Craft Politics. Andrew and I cover the Iran war, the EU’s protectionist “Made in Europe” act, and Carney’s Indo-Pacific tour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.