Undaunted by the intelligence reports, America simply manufactured the evidence it needed, a hapless Colin Powell having to pretend that a domestic gas manufacturing plant was a secret weapons manufacturing plant. At this point, simply because the British people wouldn't swallow it and Blair needed to keep his job, the pretence continued that the invasion was all about weapons of mass destruction. Once American troops had more or less combed every square inch of sand so that the excuse no longer stood up, the Americans smoothly changed the plot so that it was always about 'regime change'.
Had the British had that fed to them on day 1, I suspect that would have been the end of our involvement and possibly the end of Blair, had he stuck to his guns and gone ahead.
The 'war' began, you may recall with the obnoxious Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary, boasting about his 'shock and awe' tactics when American bombers pounded Baghdad and other key cities causing something like 8,000 innocent civilian deaths as a result of the bombing.
But it was all worth it, said the grinning, laconic Mr.Rumsfeld, because it would bring the Iraqis to their knees in weeks and hasten the end of Saddam Hussein's rule. On May 1st of that year, President Smirking Chimp visited the USS Abraham Lincoln dressed in full combat uniform and announced 'Mission Accomplished' to the cheering hordes of sailors.
Well indeed Saddam had fled and in December of that year, one of Bush's chinless wonders, one Paul Bremer who was supposedly in charge of the provisional government, but who no one in their right mind would trust to run a whelk stall, was able to have his moment in the spotlight with his immortal 'Ladies and Gentlemen! We goddim!' His day in the sun didn't last long and he left Iraq with questions being asked about where $9 billion earmarked for Iraqi rebuilding had disappeared to. The question still hangs in the air!
Well Saddam was indeed in custody so this invasion of a sovereign nation which had constituted no threat to the US or Britain had been successful, had it?
Er..well not exactly. Whatever one might have thought of Saddam's harsh authoritarian rule, extreme Islamic factions had no part in it. Now as a result of the destabilisation and America's total ineptitude at producing a post war plan of consolidation, indigenous Shia and Sunni factions, with help from Iranian and Syrian guerrilas, swept into the vacuum and reduced Iraq to a place where no one was safe to go out on the streets.
So four years on President Chimp chooses to 'celebrate' the war. One might think he would don a niqab and burkha himself and try to slip away anonymously, so crass, evil and inept has been his foreign policy but apparently not.
So far, after four years of dedication in producing chaos out of order, the cost of so doing is approximately as follows:-
The medical journal 'The Lancet' estimates the total number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000
The number of American dead is in excess of 3,000
Contractors and other US Allies dead; over 1000
Journalists and other media: 201.
It would be hard to argue that this carnage had been justified even if Iraq was now a model of western democracy. But its not. In fact its a living nightmare. Bombs are exploding daily. 30 or 40 people a day on average are being murdered. The insurgents are now flooding the country. The newly elected government is riddled with corruption in its army and police....
...and Smirking Chimp is still celebrating the war. Oh admittedly, his jaunty cockiness has gone and American objectives have come down faster than a runaway elevator, but Bush is still trying to sell some kind of success story, rather than the heinous international crime it actually was and for which he and Blair should be facing a War Crimes Tribunal.
Now readers of this blog may think this article is not constructed in the measured, rational and objective prose with which you have become familiar. Well you're goddam right it isn't!
Because this invasion changed my whole perspective on my own national leader, Tony Blair, of the lick spittle wimps who backed him and who prompted me to leave politics altogether. Because British participation in this crime made me sick to my stomach. Bitterly, furiously angry because this is the most heinous foreign expedition the British have been involved in during my long life time. For the rest of my life I will be ashamed, bitterly ashamed, of the British participation in this and, if there is a God, I ask Him to forgive all of us who couldn't do, or didn't do, enough to stop it.
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