A letter a day to number 10. No 1,486
Thursday 07 July 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Like many others, I wrote to Tony Blair prior to the invasion of Iraq because what was very clear at the time was that the hawks wanted war. George Bush was like a dog with a bone, there was nothing reasoned or temperate about his gung-ho attitude but as much as he was ramping up the invasion, he didn’t want to go it alone. The apocalyptic disaster of Vietnam still hung over America with a death toll somewhere between 1.3 and 3.9 million and a toll on American lives of 58,220.
Whatever else Britain’s role was, an ally across the Atlantic played a significant role in Bush’s warmongering. Blair’s motivation was more opaque, or so it seemed to me, but at the time I and many others feared he wanted his own Falklands, which successfully secured another term in office for Margaret Thatcher.
The problem with Iraq was that there was no case for going to war in self defence, Iraq had committed no armed aggression against the UK and what was being proposed was a war of aggression and that was my primary focus in writing to Blair.
What I received in reply was a copy of the September (dodgy) dossier in the forward of which Tony Blair cited Saddam Hussein’s capability of deploying weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes four times.
This was Blair’s golden egg. without which there were no other grounds to justify committing the supreme international war crime of a war of aggression, but such a threat blurred the edges just enough to secure the vote for war.
As ever the voices of the people raised against the war, and a march of at least 1 million in protest, were ignored. Of course, we now know irrefutably that there were no weapons of mass destruction, Bush’s ‘Shock and Awe’, an illegal war ongoing to this day, was entirely bogus. Whatever Blair might say, the nature of western armed conflict was disastrously changed and wars of aggression in the Middle East have become the de facto means of armed intervention with devastating results for millions of lives.
One burning question remains, how much longer will we tolerate war, prosecuted by those who sacrifice the lives of others but never have to pay the price themselves?
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-falklands-gamble
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/middle_east/02/uk_dossier_on_iraq/html/full_dossier.stm
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 