Just about every day in Iraq scores of people lose their lives wrecking family after family as a direct consequence of the US / British invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq back in 2003..To this day 11 years after that invasion a massive sectarian war still rages whilst according to a prominent ‘Independent ‘ journalist, jihadists have since taken control of an area the size of Great Britain, now including Iraq’s second largest city Mosul as well as large swathes of Syria. Meanwhile the 2010 figure of 650,000 plus dead must have increased by now being far closer to the 700,000 mark. ..This whilst baby’s are still being born deformed by the chemicals the Americans used during their ‘Phantom fury’ battle of Fallujah at the end of 2004 that took over 4000 lives alone, flattening much of the city.
Now here’s a question for anyone out there reading this who also happens to be a British tax payer ..Did you know that for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars your part of the £30 billion we all spent was roughly around £1000 per head .That’s a grand share that you personally paid towards taking all those thousands of lives and destroying all those thousands of homes?
How would you now feel if I were to tell you that you were duped, that you were ripped off and that you were cheated not only out of your £1000 investment but that you were also unwittingly a partner in a mass murder , a crooked, fraudulent and atrociously run business deal which went horribly wrong ..What would you want to do about it..You might feel you were entitled to some kind of criminal investigation and presumably you might want some kind of justice metered out on those criminals responsible for the loss of your fellow human beings including let us not forget the 179 British soldiers who died in Iraq.
Well don’t worry, it’s all been taken care of . Indeed the person who led you into this corrupt fraudulent and murderous deal, Tony Blair , allowed his old friend and non elected successor Gordon Brown to open an inquiry in your name.. With a carte blanche remit to interview all the notable politicians and civil servants involved, the Iraq Inquiry or the Chilcot inquiry, which has currently spent eight of your million quid, was set up five years ago to investigate where it all went wrong.. Oh but by the way you will just have to wait another six months or so, as all those taking part, Blair included, haven’t had an opportunity to sign it off yet.
Oh wait a minute, we’ve just learnt that it won’t be a carte blanche remit after all as a good proportion of the correspondence between Bush and Blair will remain secret for ‘security reasons’ because obviously we wouldn’t like to show all of America’s ‘so called enemies, Putin, half the middle east, and vast swathes of Latin America what the US were really up to with these recent imperialist wars. The US and British governments once again challenging others to learn from their democratic ways.Oh and sorry to inform you that if you didn’t already work it out , the inquiry ,having been set up by the perpetrators, is obviously not a criminal investigation and will therefore not be looking into the bleeding obvious corruption that went on in your name for the businesses of oil ,banking construction and arms dealing .
The evidence..Well we don’t need an inquiry to tell us what we already know, which when you think about it is all the inquiry will give us .Clearly we already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction, not only because they couldn’t find any but also because Paul Wolfowitz the Neo-con, one time president of the world bank and former US deputy defence secretary under George Bush let slip in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that the WMD question was chosen as an excuse for removing Saddam Hussein as it was’ the one thing we could all agree on’. Presumably because at the time it was the one thing that nobody could prove differently ..We also know that the JIC here in London ( Joint Intelligence committee) were telling Blair that the evidence for WMD was patchy and sporadic, yet Blair in the opening of the now infamous ‘ Dodgy Dossier ‘ was telling us the downright lie with the words in its preface that the evidence was- ‘extensive detailed and authoritative’.
We also don’t need an Inquiry to tell us that there was simply no evidence or justification in another Blair lie that the 45 minute claim for weapon deployment he made in the House of Commons had any justification. A lie that even Blair has since admitted was regretful.
We don’t need an inquiry to tell us that the man who sold all the information to the US which ended up in Colin Powell’s address to the UN, yes, the one where he held up that vile of what Putin has so amusingly called ‘washing powder’ ..Turned out to be an Iraqi taxi driver whose nick name was ‘curve ball’ . He admitted spinning the story because he needed the money to get a green card to live in Germany.. You just couldn’t make it up!
As for the corruption- Clearly an inquiry won’t be looking into the slippery business activities of Blair as they are of a criminal nature and would only therefore come out as incriminating evidence in a proper court of law.
It’s reported that JP Morgan the 2nd largest banking organisation in the US paid into the Bush / Cheney election ticket then led a consortium of banks who loaned the Iraq bank $ 2.5 billion to prop up the Iraq economy six months after the invasion to be repaid after the war by mortgaging Iraq’s oil. They then hired Blair on $5 million a year deal contract and still do for, yes you guessed it …advise’.As any commentator in Kuwait will merrily tell you, in news that was widely reported over here too ,that not long after he left office Blair was paid between $ 20-40 million dollars by the royal family of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s old enemies’, again for ‘advise’ He then signed another deal in 2008 with a Korean oil firm with extensive interests in Iraq,( bombs were going off right left and centre in Iraq at the time) for millions but managed to hide this deal from the public for another year .These snippets of information in Blair’s dealings are minor in the grand scheme of things- there are surely many more- but what becomes quite clear is that a man with Blair’s obvious business acumen must have known long before he lied in the house of commons and to the nation about the so called WMD that he stood to make millions..On paper all he had to do was just wait until he’d left office. We can only guess that just like any crook he and Bush thought they would get clean away with it .After the ten years of sanctions Saddam Hussein and Iraq were crippled, and with the US’s vast military advantage ,, Bush and Blair would have been convinced that after the initial invasion and battles, it would be all over..You remember Bush’s speech from the warship US Abraham Lincoln with that big sign above his head , .‘Mission accomplished’. Well it wasn’t over at all , raging as it does to this very day.
The Iraq war and the Chilcot inquiry are by far the greatest scandal of our generation. I’m sure that Stop The War, who might, it could be argued have more success if they were to call themselves ‘Start the peace’ will surely be doing all they can whenever the inquiry does come out .As citizens of what should no longer be called ‘Great’ Britain, I’ve no doubt the Iraq inquiry will sadly but undoubtedly be our last real chance to get anywhere close to taking a former prime minister and war criminal,Tony Blair down for the most heinous of modern crimes. It’s clear that a vast proportion of the population of the UK, 2 million+ of them who marched with Stop the war in March 2003 .are part of globally millions ( if not billions) who would like to witness so-called ‘democratic justice’ carried out for the 650,000+ and counting- human lives taken in their name and for the corruption that followed by Bush, Blair and company in Iraq.
When the inquiry does eventually comes out, and it could apparently ”criticize Blair.’ All I would ask is that we organize a 24-hour nonstop demonstration outside Blair’s house in Connaught Sq London W2..A demonstration like those in Tahir square Cairo that not only protest but, as Tony Benn would have said ‘Demands’ justice in a democracy. A criminal investigation must follow Chilcot’ and, Blair should be arrested,- for if as citizens we do not carry this through, then surely we will be as guilty as our establishment for turning a blind eye on these war crimes and for allowing this to happen in our name, tantamount to doing nothing. Which, as the notable Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said, is all it will take for ‘evil to triumph’
David Lawley-Wakelin, is a film-maker and teacher of film, who has made a documentary about the Iraq war. He is the activist who burst into the Leveson inquiry to shout at Tony Blair and called him a war criminal.
