World War 3 anxiety rocketed after the US confirmed their forces carried out the strike which killed Major-General Qassem Soleimani on Friday, with Iran threatening “severe revenge” against the US for the attack. US President Donald Trump announced on Twitter the US military has 52 Iranian sites on their target list in the event of retaliation from Iran as fears of war increase amid the growing tension between the two sparring countries. The British Government has urged both parties to stand down and allow for de-escalation, with shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry the costs of a conflict would be far greater than those of the Iraq War.
Speaking to Sky News on Sunday, Ms Thornberry said she had been warning her Conservative counterparts of the risks of war with Iran after receiving a chilling prediction from a senior US military adviser.
The Labour frontbencher said: “One of the reasons I warned Johnson was because the Chief of Staff of Colin Powell, who people will remember was the general responsible for the Iraq War, said, ‘we’re going down the same path as we did before the Iraq War.’
“But a war with Iran will be 10 to 15 times worse in terms of loss of lives and costs.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2007 the invasion of Iraq would cost the US Government $2.7 trillion (£2 trillion) by 2017. According to the Ministry of Defence, the British Government spent £8.4 billion on operations on Iraqi soil between 2003 and 2009.
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The US Department of Defence (DoD) reported 4,224 soldiers died in Iraq, with an additional 31,952 wounded according to 2016 calculations. British Armed Forces reported 179 service personnel and 3 Government civilian personnel died in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.
The number of civilian casualties has varied through the years, with the Iraq Body Count project documenting up to 206,107 deaths from violence both during the war and in its aftermath while a survey from the scientific journal Lancet connected 601,027 civilian deaths in the 2003-2006 period to the conflict.
Ms Thornberry continued: “Powell’s chief of staff said we have to stop, it was wrong for us to go to war in Iraq, it’ll be even worse if we go to war with Iran. I have been warning about this and we find ourselves now in this situation.
“The question now for Britain is, do we stand firm and say to the Americans this is the wrong thing to do, do not drag us into a war, we refuse to be involved in a war?”
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Officials revealed the attack was carried out “at the direction of the president”, and Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif branded the move “rogue adventurism”.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered three days of mourning in Iran after Soleimani’s death and vowed “severe revenge” on those behind the attack.
But the US President pledged an immediate response in the event of a retaliatory attack from Tehran: “Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, and badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters.
“He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.
“Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”
The choice of 52 sites is believed to be a reference to the 52 hostages held in the US Embassy in Tehran for over a year in what is now known as the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979.