http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1173989,00.htmlImagine, for a moment, the following scenario. American and British troops battle their way into Iraqi territory, sprayed with anthrax shells and gas bombs. In Cyprus and Tel Aviv, rockets explode, loaded with biological agents. After a bitter struggle, coalition forces seize control of the country. They find concealed rocket silos with missiles primed for attacks on distant European targets; plans are found for rocket attacks on London. At other sites they find an advanced nuclear bomb project and barrels full of chemical weapons. They flush out an al-Qaida stronghold where they find the battle plan of world terrorism. Saddam and Bin Laden were, after all, in cahoots.
A year ago this was the fanciful vision that pushed Blair to side with Bush and go to war in Iraq. They braced their troops and populations for the worst, and the more gullible believed them (I talked to Londoners planning their evacuation route from the capital). The rest of us saw the arguments for the claptrap they were. The reality from March 20 last year to March 20 this year has been grotesquely different. Two of the world's most sophisticated armed forces brushed aside a tinpot army of soldiers without boots, smashed Iraq's cities to pieces, killed thousands of civilians and captured Iraq's oil more or less intact. There were, as any intelligent observer could have told them, no WMD, no centre of world terrorism, no aggressive intent.
In the past 12 months, deserters from the Bush/Blair cause have revealed piecemeal the reality. War was planned long in advance against a soft Arab target that nobody much liked. The intelligence services knew that they were being asked to endorse fairy tales. The attorney general has come clean on how he was forced to turn an illegal war into a lawful war of defence against the Iraqi threat. The duplicity was systematic, and remains so. Blair has no regrets. He bays defiant nonsense about the terrible menace that has been removed, and the greater terrorist menace still at large. Not once has he expressed regret for what a dozen years of sanctions and war inflicted on the Iraqi people. Enough that his cause is just.
There is no pleasure in saying, a year on, that we told you so. Invasion invited worldwide hostility, divided (and still divides) Europe, weakened the UN and, above all, provoked precisely the confrontation with terror that the war was supposed to alleviate. I have been told to stop carping and let the British and Americans get on with the job of ruling Iraq now they are there. But this is tantamount to endorsing the war. Why are the US and Britain there, in illegal occupation of a sovereign state? Why should we accept this reality and knuckle down to Blair's call to arms? Today's demonstration is a reminder that what was a war of unprovoked aggression a year ago has not been changed by victory.
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