MUST READ - The war in Iraq was not a blunder or a mistake. It was a crime [View all]

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/07/blair-chilcot-war-in-iraq-not-blunder-crime
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Tony Blair is damned. We have seen establishment whitewashes in the past: from Bloody Sunday to Hillsborough, officialdom has repeatedly conspired to smother truth in the interests of the powerful. But not this time. The Chilcot inquiry was becoming a satirical byword for taking farcically long to execute a task; but Sir John will surely go down in history for delivering the most comprehensively devastating verdict on any modern prime minister.

Those of us who marched against the Iraq calamity can feel no vindication, only misery that we failed to prevent a disaster that robbed hundreds of thousands of lives – those of 179 British soldiers among them – and which injured, traumatised and displaced millions of people: a disaster that bred extremism on a catastrophic scale.

One legacy of Chilcot should be to encourage us to be bolder in challenging authority, in being sceptical of official claims, in standing firm against an aggressive agenda spun by the media. Lessons must be learned, the war’s supporters will now declare. Don’t let them get away with it. The lessons were obvious to many of us before the bombs started falling.

For what Chilcot has done is illustrate that assertions from the anti-war movement were not conspiracy theories, or far-fetched, wild-eyed claims. “Increasingly, we appear to have a government who are looking for a pretext for war rather than its avoidance,” declared the anti-war Labour MP Alan Simpson weeks before the invasion. And indeed, as Chilcot revealed, Blair had told George W Bush in July 2002: “I will be with you, whatever.”