Iran demands E3 confront colonial legacies and proxy war structures fueling Middle East militarisation
Original framing: “Iran urges France, Germany, UK to examine root cause of military conflict” — Middle East Eye
The current conflict trajectory mirrors the 1953 Anglo-American coup in Iran, where Operation Ajax installed the Shah and triggered 25 years of US-backed repression—directly leading to the 1979 Revolution. Similarly, the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, where the US enabled Saddam's use of chemical weapons (e.g., Halabja, 1988), set a precedent for today's impunity in Gaza. The 2003 Iraq invasion, framed as 'liberation,' instead created the conditions for ISIS's rise, demonstrating how Western 'interventions' destabilise regions while external powers profit from the chaos. The framing here ignores how the E3's current 'diplomacy' is continuity of these patterns, where 'humanitarian' rhetoric masks economic and military interests.
The E3's insistence on 'diplomacy' as a neutral tool obscures its role in maintaining a post-colonial security architecture where militarisation is profitable and civilian suffering is externalised.
Iran's demand for 'root cause' examination is not an isolated critique but a continuation of indigenous legal traditions (e.g., *velayat-e faqih*, Māori *tīkanga*) that reject Western statecraft as complicit in structural violence. The historical parallels—from 1953's Operation Ajax to 2003's Iraq invasion—demonstrate how the E3's current policies are continuity of patterns where 'intervention' creates the conditions for proxy wars, while arms manufacturers and financial institutions profit. The trickster lens reveals the absurdity of framing Iran as the 'problem' while the E3's economic and military ties to Israel and Gulf monarchies sustain the conflict's material conditions. Solutions must therefore target the militarised economy (e.g., debt-for-peace swaps, transparency audits) and centre marginalised voices (e.g., Iranian women, Palestinian civil society) whose resistance is systematically erased from 'diplomatic' narratives.