As Oliver Kamm dumps his latest bucketload of fish into the barrel of British political commentary, I feel obliged, yet again, to reach for my trusty rifle.

The basic premise of more or less everything Kamm writes – were it not obvious enough – was revealed beautifully in an interview with Marcus Brigstocke on BBC4’s The Late Edition (a kind of British attempt at imitating the US’s hugely successful Daily Show format). Why, asked Brigstocke – and reasonably enough – should Britain have the right to renew its Trident nuclear missile system if we denied the right to possess nuclear weapons to countries like Iran and North Korea? The answer, as Kamm put it, was simple: “we are a civilised state; Iran and North Korea are not.”

Once you comprehend this basic article of faith, you can comprehend (and, indeed, predict) Kamm’s intellectual output, virtually in its entirety. This classic imperialist’s credo endures in the face of all evidence and rational thought. It’s hadly a unique assumption, of course: as the historian Mark Curtis has accurately summed it up, virtually the entire mainstream media is saturated with the ideology of the “basic benevolence” motivating Britain’s foreign policy. Where Kamm differs from others is in the extraordinary zeal with which he exhorts this line, issuing vigorous denunciations of anyone who might regard it even as worthy of question. The only verification required, it would seem, is the word of our “Dear Leader”. The word of the leaders of enemy states, by contrast, are so meaningless as to be worthy of instant, contemptuous dismissal.

Kamm’s latest piece on Comment Is Free illustrates this admirably. The recently departed Tony Blair’s “liken[ing] Iran to the emerging threat of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s” is, apparently, “understated” (we’ve been here before). For “[a]t a minimum, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are equipping Shi’ite terrorists in Iraq with improvised explosive devices to attack Iraqi and US troops”. To prove this, Kamm links to an article which includes the following passages:

“Two months ago, the US president, George Bush, said the Quds brigade was providing networks outside Iran with devices, though he rowed back on claims by his administration that high level Iranian leadership was ordering the moves. He said he did not know who was ordering the smuggling of weapons”

“no incontrovertible proof of links to Iran has been presented by the US or UK.”

“At a minimum”, then, on this count Iran is guilty of precisely fuck all. But the sources to which the claim is attributed in the article are themselves rather interesting – in order, they are: “Tony Blair”; “Mr Blair”; “British and US officials”; “George Bush”; “the US”; “Mr Blair”. On the basis of this “evidence”, Kamm writes: “Iran’s activities confirm Blair’s diagnosis.” Or, as others have phrased it, “the Dear Leader said so, so it’s true.”

Kamm’s claims on Iran’s nuclear programme are just as dubious. I have noted previously the nonsensical nature of assertions that Ahmadinejad is embarking on a region-wide genocidal pogrom, but it’s still Iran’s intent, Kamm is keen to imply. The evidence, again, is interesting. For statements that Ahmadinejad has disseminated, Kamm links to an article by Jason Burke, which reports the former’s alleged claim that “Iran has an inalienable right to nuclear weapons”. I have not been able to find support for this claim anywhere – although Ahmadinehad has essentially said the exact opposite:

TIME: Does Iran have the right to nuclear weapons?

Ahmadinejad: We are opposed to nuclear weapons. We think it has been developed just to kill human beings. It is not in the service of human beings. For that reason, last year in my address to the U.N. General Assembly, I suggested that a committee should be set up in order to disarm all the countries that possess nuclear weapons.

In terms of nuclear politics, writes Kamm, “When the presidency of Iran is held by a messianic crank and virulent antisemite, we are not dealing with the minimally rational political agent that a system of stable deterrence requires.” Even were we to believe Kamm’s (eerily familiar) depiction of the near-total irrationality of the Iranian President, it’s irrelevant. In Iran’s political system, according to the BBC, “presidential powers are circumscribed by the clerics and conservatives in Iran’s power structure, and by the authority of the Supreme Leader. It is the Supreme Leader, not the president, who controls the armed forces and makes decisions on security, defence and major foreign policy issues.”

Does Iran actually have a nuclear weapons programme? We don’t know. Certainly the IAEA have said there’s no evidence of such a thing. If it does, of course, it matters, just as it matters if any other country has a nuclear weapons programme – or, for that matter, nuclear weapons themselves. And even within the Middle East there is at least one other, rather more appropriate target for international opprobrium in this regard. Given the extraordinary rhetoric from Israeli leaders on the potential uses of their own devastating arsenal, that state’s own nuclear weapons should surely be considered at least as dangerous as any potential Iranian bomb. Whatever solution we choose to apply to Iran’s alleged nuclear programme then, we must surely also apply to Israel’s. We must, that is, unless we choose to forgo the universal applicability of moral standards in favour of “civilisation versus barbarism” – a convenient, if increasingly threadbare, model of reality.