Leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Three minutes after ten is the time.

And as I begin to talk to you this morning,

or rather invite you to talk to me,

I glance to my right and see a screen.

I think it is Sky News,

where a very angry looking fellow with a big beard in a big black hat

is raging at the screen.

He is, I think, a leader of Hisbalah.

And there's a dread sense, isn't there, of deja vu,

about all this, with one crucial difference,

is that the president of the United States of America is as mad as a box of frogs and getting worse almost daily.

And geopolitics being what it is, the British prime minister,

whose track record for delicate, difficult decision-making and diplomacy

is probably best summed up with the words Nazanine Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is now facing, in many ways,

an epochal decision. When ISIS deliberately targeted destinations of major cultural and historical significance,

it in some ways distilled their barbarism even more than when they targeted human targets.

I'll tell you what I mean by that. It's as if war is about killing people.

But bombing culturally significant, historically significant sites is on a different level.

There's a reason why it's deliberately addressed by, I think, the Geneva Convention, isn't it?

And the definition of war crimes, because it seeks almost to erase, to denigrate identity.

And yet, of course, most of the people living in Iran or formerly Persia, or many of the people living there, would see their culturally significant sites in much the same way that we see.

...