subject: The Iraq debacle [print this page] Resumption of public hearings by the five member panel under John Chilcot a civil servant going into the grounds on which Britain sent its troops to Iraq to topple the Saddam government comes as a hope to all those who wanted to get to the bottom of the truth. Nothing perhaps disturbed the collective conscience of the Brits in the recent past as the Iraq adventure. The panel is leaving no stone unturned in its quest for the truth and would be travelling to France and the US to meet senior officials involved in the decision making including John Bremer the US diplomat who governed Iraq's Provisional Authority after Sadddam's fall.
While such a fact finding exercise could help in bringing out the roles and of all those players in the war drama and their share of the blame, the basic question as to whether Britain needed to go to war at all needs no expert probe. We are after all not living in the days of yore when kings would declare war at their whims, modern wars are extremely costly affairs that could bleed a country's economy and the cost to human life and suffering cannot be quantified. The only war fought by Britain that could be justified after the great world wars is the war against Argentina where Britain had to safeguard its overseas interests in the Falklands. The Iraq expedition was an avoidable adventure which failed on all fronts, the failure to conclusively prove that Iraq was making chemical bombs, the very basis of the attack came as a slap on UK's face. While it is one thing to hold our views on world happenings it is totally a different one to go to war on the basis of our beliefs. Assuming things were going wrong we could just not afford to be the world's policeman. As a wag remarked if it was piling up of arms that prompted us to attack Iraq, the UK and the US have 100 times more weaponry than Iraq any day.
The wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have only helped in creating the image that the UK does not have its own foreign policy and acts as a stooge of the USA, an image that sits like a black patch on a country which ruled 3/4 of the world during its glorious days.
