Debate contribution: Illegal US and Israeli Attacks on Iran

Debate contribution by Dr Steve Aiken OBE on 16 March 2026.

MLA

Dr Steve Aiken OBE

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

16 March 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Illegal US and Israeli Attacks on Iran

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5449428

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Deputy Speaker. I had hoped, probably forlornly, that the debate would be about the real issues and what is going on. I have a couple of declarations of interest to make. The first is that I work very closely with an Iranian diaspora group, and I have recently spent quite a lot of time talking to members of the Iranian diaspora. I have a lot of notes here, but, quite frankly, there is no point in talking to them, because it will not lead to any variation in the debate. The first question is this: does the Iranian regime represent a threat? The answer is, very clearly, yes. It is not Iran or the Iranian people but the Iranian regime — the IRGC — that represents a threat. The IRGC is a country within a country. It controls the state and the religious police: the police who go around blinding women. They are the ones who grab women, put them into prisons and conduct mass rape. Those are not my words; they are the words of the Iranians. The other issue that Iranians have is that there seems to have been — how can I put this? We have seen it today — the idea that there is somehow some chicness about the Iranian regime and what the ayatollahs have done. I have not yet met an Iranian who is supportive of the Iranian regime and how it survives. I have not yet met an Iranian who has told me that he is sorry that the ayatollah was taken out. All of them want to see Iran be a proper country and be able to grow and develop. Previously, it had one of the most developed education systems in the region. It educated women. Unlike Afghanistan, or wherever, it educated women to a degree that many of them had jobs. Is it a surprise now that so many of the diaspora are women who have escaped Iran? Why have they done that? They have escaped because it has become a theocracy. It is a theocracy that is hell-bent on creating its own dynamic and power within the region. I was hoping that someone would talk about Barack Obama and his plan when he started the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). When talk on that policy started, the uranium enrichment of nuclear fuel was around 2% to 3%. I will make another declaration of interest: I am probably the only person here who has been in charge of a nuclear power plant. Fuel inside a nuclear power plant is enriched to somewhere between 4% and 5%. Sometimes, it is enriched up to about 12%. At the most recent so-called peace talks in Geneva, the International Atomic Energy Agency briefed the team that uranium enrichment was now at 65%-plus. The only reason why you would make nuclear fuel with uranium enrichment of 65%-plus is to build an atomic bomb. That is what the Iranians were going to do, because, last July, its ability to make atomic bombs had been taken out, but they still had enriched uranium left over. What were we going to wait for? Were we going to wait to see the first atomic test by the Iranians and a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv? What did we expect the Iranian regime to do? Let us look at its history and what it has done in the past. Look at the number of times that it has attacked the United States, Israel and us. A friend of mine here fought in Iraq. I was in Iraq. A lot of the bombs and IEDs that were used against us were produced by the Iranians and the Revolutionary Guard. Exactly the same thing happened in Afghanistan. If we are serious about calling out terrorist regimes, we should have called out Iran. We should have been doing that for years, but we did not. Some people were happy to cosy up to ayatollahs, have tea and sticky buns with them and have their photographs taken on Bobby Sands Street in Tehran. We have a concern, which I will express in the 10 seconds that I have left: in the middle of Tehran is a clock that is counting down to when Israel is going to be abolished and taken out.

That is a reason for supporting our amendment.

732 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:13 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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