Today the last US combat brigade left Iraq. Now the only Americans left are a few “advisers” – all right, 50,000 of them if you want to be pedantic. What a disaster they and the British Labour government that so foolishly helped them are leaving behind.
Earlier this week, a suicide bomb outside an Iraqi army recruiting centre in Baghdad killed at least 59 people. July was the most violent month for two years, though the Americans contest the figure of more than 530 killed. This denial represents progress of a kind. For a long time the American and British authorities were profoundly uninterested in how many Iraqi civilians were killed. This means we have had to rely on unofficial estimates, like the one from Iraq Body Count which reckons the figure is around 100,000.
Five months after the Iraqi elections, there is still no government. An ethnically and religiously divided country has patently dissolved into enemy factions, with the promise of more death and destruction.
Labour constantly told us that invading Iraq would make Britain more secure. Well, before we launched our attack, al-Qaeda were a nonentity there – you see they were Saddam Hussein’s enemy too. Now they are a power, and, many fear, a growing one. And still none of the conspirators who conjured up this disastrous war has said “sorry”. (Use the search button to find many earlier Iraq blogs.)
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