Rory Stewart

We've got bases in Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, all being subject to attack.

So this could go in any sort of really quite dangerous directions.

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Yeah.

Now, Rory, I'm doing this live podcast with you.

If I was doing it with our American counterpart, Mr. Scaramucci, and I were to ask him the question, how much do you think Wag the Dog is being brought into the equation?

What do you think he would say?

Well, Wag the Dog was a film...

starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, I think.

And basically what happened was the American president was caught up in a big sex scandal, I think just getting up to the election.

And his kind of Alastair Campbell figure, a guy called Conrad, he somehow constructed a fake war, would you believe, against Albania.

So America went to war with Albania to stop this.

So wag the dog basically means where bad things are happening, you create something far bigger so that the world stops talking about the bad thing and they start talking about the thing you want to.

Now, in that, I don't minimise, by the way, how awful the Iranian regime is and how Iran has been seen as a threat by all sorts of countries for a long, long time.