The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish. The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces. Britain should immediately hold a full inquiry into the mistakes made before and during the war in Iraq out of pure self-interest. Gordon Brown’s suggestion that holding such an inquiry now would somehow threaten the stability of Iraq is either a piece of obvious prevarication or, if taken at face value, a sign of absurd vanity. Iraqis show not the slightest interest in British policy and assume it will simply be an echo of decisions made in Washington. I have watched this war being fought over the last five years and I never for a moment felt that the Government in London had the […]