Watching the latest pandemonium engulf our (greater) neighbourhood — and watching Cypriot public opinion tear itself apart over the flames of Operation Epic Fury in Iran — you begin to grasp the full scale of the geopolitical madness we've been living through for the past decade.
Every time a new shitstorm erupts in the region, preferably one involving Israel and/or the United States (because, let's say, who gave a damn about the Syrian civil war, Yemen, or Sudan, right?), the usual suspects crawl out of their social media burrows to sing the same dreary hymn: not loud enough in condemning the US and Israel? You're siding with the invaders, the imperialists, the genocidaires. You criticise an illegal attack on a sovereign state by invoking international law? You're siding with the mullahs, the oppressors, the terrorists. How do we manage, every single time, to reduce a global crisis to a football derby — our national speciality, since in this country the benchmark for everything is football — where International Law is a banner we wave when it suits us and toilet paper when it ruins our narrative?
By the way, you can be against Trump and Putin and Netanyahu and the Iranian ayatollahs, all at once. It's remarkably easy, you know. It's called basic bloody common sense. Which, in every crisis that erupts, is invariably the first out the window — like a Vladimir political opponent. Everything else is just desperate people hunting for validation of their "correct" positions and their place on "the right side of history" — a frenzy of self-fulfilling prophecies that torches whatever brain cells they had left. If any remained.
The camp that’s passionately pro-intervention focuses on the nature of the Tehran regime: a brutal theocracy that suppresses (and murders) women, executes dissidents, and exports instability through terrorist proxies — a regime that, by the Western perspective, lacks moral legitimacy. But there's a catch. History shows that toppling a tyrant from the outside very rarely automatically delivers democracy. Usually, what follows — civil war, chaos — is far worse than the stable tyranny that preceded it. Look no further than Iran's neighbours. In Iraq, the removal of Saddam Hussein unleashed a bloody civil war, gave birth to ISIS, and shredded the social fabric. The people were rid of a dictator but were plunged into a decade of terror and total institutional collapse. In Afghanistan, after twenty years of intervention and trillions of dollars, the Taliban walked back into power in 2021, leaving the country in a worse humanitarian condition than before. In both cases, the West proved itself perfectly capable of demolishing a power structure — and utterly incapable of building anything viable in its place. The possible exception is the (equally illegal) surgical operation in Venezuela to remove Maduro, where the transition to democracy looks more manageable — though Venezuela is also far more stable and far closer to the Western orbit than Iraq or Afghanistan.
The attack on Iran without a UN mandate is a flagrant violation of international law. When great powers act as they please, they annul the authority of the UN. If Washington can bomb Iran because it deems it a threat, then Moscow and Beijing have just been handed the moral alibi to do the same in their spheres of influence. Even smaller but regionally powerful states — Turkey, for example — may feel emboldened to throw their weight around in their own neighbourhood. You'd have to be very stupid to live in Cyprus and applaud any of this. Not to mention that the definition of "brutal regime" has become elastic. States with equally authoritarian practices remain untouched if they are Western allies — Saudi Arabia, for instance, one of the most inhumane regimes on the planet — which reveals that the real motive is geopolitical power, not human rights.
The moment we accept that the US and Israel have the right to invade and bomb a country because they consider it a threat, a pariah, or a bad actor — or simply because it's run by a regime they despise — we hand Erdoğan the perfect argument. With what face do we invoke UN resolutions on Cyprus tomorrow, when today we're closing our eyes at their demolition in Iran? If legality becomes an à la carte menu, guess which dish Ankara will order first.
All of this, of course, depends on how we outsiders see things — through the filter of our own ideology and our country's interests. As for the Persians themselves — an ancient people with a rich civilisation to rival that of the ancient Greeks, who, despite centuries of rivalry as the great powers of their age, respected and admired one another — a people on whom first the Shah and then the ayatollahs were imposed — what matters is what they want. And the celebrations at the news of Khamenei's death, especially after the massacre of forty thousand people during the recent uprisings against the regime, do not go unnoticed. We care about international legality, and they care about liberation from the ayatollahs' grip. For both of us, it is a matter of survival.
So while our homegrown idiots compete to see who can best whitewash their favourite invader — Putin in Ukraine, or Trump/Netanyahu in Iran — they are opening the door for the next one who decides that our own “back yard” belongs to him. In the case of Iran, there is no black and white. There is an autocratic, murderous regime that oppresses its own people, and a West that violates every international treaty to bring it down. When you don't know which side to pick, you pick legality. Not because we are moral, but because for Cyprus at least, legality is all we have left.
This article was originally published on 01.03.2026
Source: WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHICH SIDE TO PICK, YOU PICK LEGALITY
