by Robert Fisk
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the
steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever
finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in
the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the
Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our
remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry - but not yet! If only inadequacy
was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the
people - the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world - not rise up in
rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about
Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it
happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now
tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely
knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. . . .
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty
of American statesmen - Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz - have either
never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight
for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood
titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only
experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown. . . .
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than
the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War,
which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as
300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the
civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or - more
terrible still - two Hiroshimas. . . .
FULL TEXT
Enver Masud, "Iraq War: 'Supreme
International Crime'," The Wisdom Fund, July 4, 2005
Patrick Cockburn, "Iraqis
abandon their homes in Middle East's new refugee exodus," Independent, February 1, 2007
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, "The
Enormous Cost of War," Nation, August 17, 2007
"Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis: survey," Reuters,
January 30, 2008
Nir Rosen, "The Myth of the Surge," Rolling Stone,
March 6, 2008
"Protesters Across the World Condemn Iraq
War," Agence France Presse, March 15, 2008
Raymond Whitaker and Stephen Foley, "Iraq: Who won the war?," Independent, March 16, 2008
Editorial: "Five
years on, the hard lessons that we must learn from Iraq," Guardian,
March 16, 2008
"Iraq 5 Years In: An overview of major
events in the conflict," Washington Post, March 18, 2008
"5 Years Ago: Why Was Public So Misinformed on Facts Leading
to War?," Editor and Publisher, March 23, 2008
Zbigniew Brzezinski, "How to End the War," Washington Post,
March 30, 2008
John Pilger, "Let's learn from Blair’s crimes, so we don’t repeat them in
Syria," newstatesman.com, February 16, 2012