There’s an absolute stinker of an article in today’s New York Times, emotively talking up an terrible lawsuit. When stripped of irrelevant interviews with soldiers’ widows and scary quotes from showboating neoconservative lawyers, here’s the actual story.

The US didn’t take the news very well when its puppet state in Iran had a revolution in 1979. The affront was exacerbated by Iranian revolutionaries’ decision, after the US gave asylum to their murderous and corrupt ex-Shah, to take the remaining US diplomats in Iran hostage. This created a diplomatic crisis which wasn’t resolved until 1981 [1], and more importantly made the US look silly and impotent.

As a direct result, the US government, much as with the Cuban regime that followed a similar drill 20 years previously, has a hatred for Iran that far exceeds its actual wrongdoing [2]. This includes the (completely lawful, although ridiculous) imposition of sanctions on US companies trading in Iran, and the (questionably lawful, and ridiculous) imposition of sanctions on foreign companies trading in Iran.

So banks in Europe – in this suit, HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Credit Suisse – continued to trade with companies in Iran. Whether or not you like its current rulers [3], Iran is a nation state with a better human rights and terrorism funding record than many US allies (notably Saudi Arabia, which funded Al Qaeda and the exceptionally inept Islamic State) and non-enemies (China still leads the world in executions). There are no moral grounds for claiming that westerners trading with Iran are more complicit in evil than the westerners who traded with authoritarian China to make the device that you’re reading this on [4].

Next up, in 2003, US launched a humanitarian mission to neighbouring Iraq. You may have heard of it, somewhere, along the way. I chose the picture at the top of this post to remind us all of the mission’s humanitarian nature.

The Iranian government reacted to the collapse of its Iraqi enemy by funding Shia militias (many of which were also funded by the US government at various points, and without which the Sunni militias who later became Islamic State would have been unopposed in ethnically cleansing the Shia). In the course of the humanitarian mission, quite a few US servicemen, who had previously volunteered to sign up and fight whenever the US decided to have a humanitarian mission, were killed or wounded [5], some by Shia militias.

Now, the families of some of these people (the American volunteers, obviously, not the Iraqi victims) are trying to sue the European banks who traded with normal companies in Iran, on the basis that somewhere down the line, the money that was traded might have found its way via the government into the Shia militias’ pockets. As Dsquared notes on Twitter, this is roughly equivalent to suing Kellogg’s because the July 7 bombers had Coco Pops for breakfast, or suing Henry Ford because you were blown up by a car bomber in a Cortina.

One of the piece of evidence in the lawsuit, gleefully seized upon by the New York Times as highlighting the banks’ depravity, is a quote that actually highlights the opposite:

The Times’s editorialising here is a great illustration of the US’s total vanity. Its leading centre-left news outlet – and quite possibly its courts, who ruled for the plaintiffs in a similar, although less farcically indirect case – simply don’t understand that they aren’t the God-ordained rulers of the rest of the world.

[1] Possibly delayed due to incoming president Reagan’s backroom deal with Iran, although I’m sceptical he was bright enough to pull off quite such an intricate conspiracy.

[2] A hatred which has more or less guaranteed the survival of the unpleasant regimes in both countries by undermining local opposition and providing the ruling party with a plethora of patriotic rallying opportunities.

[3] Although if you do like Iran’s current rulers, it seems likely that you are a fairly terrible person.

[4] If you’re reading this on a device which has no components manufactured in authoritarian China, then I am very impressed by your dedication.

[5] Alongside several orders of magnitude more Iraqis, who hadn’t been quite so blessed with the opportunity to choose.

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