Jack Straw accused the US President of not being 'thoughtful'(Image: Julian Hamilton/Sunday Mirror)

I was directly involved in the decisions leading to the 2003 Iraq war. I take my responsibilities for that very seriously. They will go with me to the grave.

We were, inevitably, the junior partner with the United States. That’s the nature of the so-called ‘special relationship’. But there were two differences compared with today’s US war against Iran.

The first difference was that the decisions on Iraq were taken in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks just eighteen months before. Unprovoked, those attacks led to the largest loss of life on the mainland of the United States since the Civil War in the 1860s. They traumatised the whole nation.

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Keir Starmer was praised for not joining Donald Trump in military action(Image: MATTHEW HORWOOD,MANDEL NGAN, POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Tony Blair was quite right to say that the UK ‘stood shoulder to shoulder’ with the US. We had to. That leads me to the second difference. US President George W Bush, in office then, may not have been to everybody’s liking. Nor were some around him, like Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld. But in private Bush was a bright, thoughtful man, with surprisingly little ego, who had some very good people around him, not least Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security chief Condi Rice. We had a continuous dialogue going. We could and did disagree, but in private.

Compare that to the war against Iran which US President Donald Trump has unleashed. You can’t exactly call Trump ‘thoughtful’. His impulses are dominated by his overweening ego. He doesn’t think things through, but rather lurches.

I know a lot about the theocratic Iranian regime. I’ve visited Iran eight times. That includes a ‘holiday’ which my wife, a couple of friends, and I tried to have in Iran in 2015 (with the full agreement of the Iranian government). Our holiday was disrupted by the Basij – irregular volunteers attached to the Revolutionary Guards – so badly that we had to be given police protection. In the end we came home early.

The regime in Iran is terrible. As it has comprehensively lost popular support (at least 80% of the people can’t stand them any more), it’s become more and more brutal. But if you are going to attack Iran you need a plan. Wars produce chaos. Easy to start, but you also need to work out how they might finish. You can knock out the Iranian navy’s big ships. They’ve gone. But Iran was always going to use small boats, some unmanned, to cause mayhem in the Gulf of Hormuz. We see the result. Our Prime Minister Keir Starmer was therefore entirely correct to say to Donald Trump, ‘thanks but no thanks, this is your war, not ours’.